Spin Doctor

Sand from the beach tainted with buried rubbish, dead starfish, bits of broken beer bottles green like the sea looks right now. Only you can scoop handfuls of dirt and create an addiction, irresistible to the sweet tooth, brown sugar sticking to the roofs of our mouths.

Don’t mind the sharp pieces; they’re not metal or bone, I promise. Chew harder, focus, it’s only difficult because it’s worth it 

You are an expert at feeding people the same death that awaits them when hard work eventually snaps their spines neatly in the middle. You call it opportunity.

Your hands are dry and hot, a furnace to melt before you mold the fragments of broken glass hearts into whatever shape you want. Twist them into shot glasses, paperweights, award statuettes like pyramids engraved with your name and accomplishments:

In recognition of your achievement in the realm of empty futures constructed using the blind hope of others as pillars  

Baron Samedi, an evil name ending with a European flourish to add to your allure, one who inspires fear and gives us something to flee from. Charlatans fashion themselves in your image and call it inspiration. Despots model their look after you, locking the progress and prosperity of an entire people in an iron safe next to stacks of foreign currency and ugly gold jewelry.

More dangerous than a blatant opportunist, you don’t grab greedily, but rather leech love and admiration with finesse and carefully calculated movements. Fiddle with the cuffs, adjust a jacket button that is not in need of fixing, clear your throat roughly and with authority, toss slightly outdated slang together with words from the back of the dictionary you think we forgot to read.

Spinning all the people around you on the tip of a paper knife, not so sharp as to cause permanent injury but just enough to maintain a dull throb and desperation for relief.

You have added a new funeral song to our hymnal, one that is and isn’t about you. Singing is almost a fruitless exercise because you will still manage to turn it into a tribute to your greatness.

Instead we scream