I. An Almost-Overlooked Movement Suggests an Unnatural Hand at Work
The torture of a turning phrase, which I, in turn, have turned withal. Danger in the solitary cell tucked away in a corner of a nearly forgotten wing of the dungeon city of Saint Francis! What torments await the one who presumes to while away the days of boredom and the nights of horrific visions and condemnatory apparitions of abstract transgressions with the soothing balm of pen and scraps of aloe leaf smuggled into my traitor's cell by the hand of a sympathetic sentry, moved by the eloquence of a terrorist's forbidden locutions? Thrice-crowned, candy-striped antenna transmitting invisible beams of sound and sight, panopticon of an encyclopedic yet elusive mind, hurling globs of homogenizing circus manna onto the wilderness of hills and trollies below, a reign of terror broadcast nightly from the blade edge of the guillotine, slicing succinctly this age of consent into equal halves of fervor and farce, your will is closely guarded, like this contrabandist's prison, but your intentions are as opaque as the steel tripod bracing your colossal insolence. From the archer's slit in an otherwise hermetic chamber the torture of a turning phrase rides my line of sight directly to your triple coronet, your tripartite aspiration of the subjugation of past, present and future which I, in turn, have aspired to turn without, and which has left me nameless, secret identity intact, for now, in a land of compulsory cross-references.
