a trip to the renaissance festival…

Down the hatch.

We be nonparticipant observers today. Today is only science.

We endeavored to look upon a strange world with stranger eyes.

This is anthropology.

My head becomes heavy and my umbrella turns to wax in my hands.

The bearded one guides me.

Look around.

This is the real haunted safari.

The tatterdemalion trappings of folklore and the nauseating hues and fabrics from the contemporary realm clash all too loudly here.

The madrigal folk are roused and we walk among them.

A coven of nuns produce a heavenly note.

The starry bearded one escorts us down the rabbit hole.

People are exaggerated distortions, caricatures of themselves and none seem to know but I.

These bionic and cockeyed entities from past and present lope along like decaying creatures lost without a time.

These are sad dinosaur folk.

An owl woman pivots backwards to spy me. She does not belong here any more than I do. But she doesn’t know it.

Mankind is a sick, leering Ethiopian jungle show.

I wonder, can these twisted creatures see me? But can they really see me as I see them? As comical self-caged animals?

Painted heads on stilts and fairy book characters lurk in this forest land.

They do not exist but they live here still.

It is laughter and pageantry and I cannot help but laugh at the humor as well as the horror of it all.

My grin stretches outside the boundaries of flesh. I cannot contain my delight.

Women have exchanged faces with their children. Men have become hunched and bird-like.

A cloaked figure disappears and then returns. He is a man so bird-like you forget he has hands. He’s trying to blend in with this freakshow.

Sterile and wrong faces float through an all too vivid environment. The cloaked one unnerves me.

Study them, I must.

We explored deeper and I saw the wuffel beast. What a tragic punctuation to a winding grove full of bearded ladies and magic.

Fat plumes out of ill-fitted sloppy clothing producing the illusion of stout human bowling pins of gelatin. But is it illusion?

Jangled expressions and mangled reflections.

Everyone is tired from dragging their chains.

At our highest moment we depart the dying revelers only to be cast out into the deadness of space.

A silent, vacant land of identical cars resides here. No joy and no people. No magic.

It is a mechanical graveyard and it sets one on edge.

Without the forest’s canopy to shield us from atmospheric attack we are at last exposed to the elements.

There is no blue or bright colors of any kind. All is muted death.

The ominous gray clouds loom impossibly close. There are no trees to keep them at a safe distance here.

Enough of this. If the fair be a lie I want lies.

We return once more to immerse ourselves in the curious juxtaposition of the wooded faux-culture of magic and ugly, parasitic tourism.

People still lope as in a sad evolutionary parade and the fair folk’s yarns fall on mostly undeserving and deaf ears,

But one must laugh at such horrors as these or else one will surely go mad.