The King in Orange I

Across a cultivated green, you can find him shambling and swaying like a drunken dotard,

surrounded by an air of wounded viciousness that a life of money had only exacerbated. Vacant eyed, he wanders confused, muttering in rambling, incoherent phrases that are often accompanied

by the sinister, slow draw of unseen violins and the high pitched piping of featherless birds that hide in his throat. Spittle sprays from his mouth and the drool, thick with the debris it collects as it rolls down his skin, pools in the fat folds of his neck. Deaf interpreters cover their eyes, quivering and shaking in roiling ecstasy, each one desperate to dip their proboscis in to slurp up that unclean nectar, rich with the rot of dead skin. Then they bray in a discordant cacophony sounding for all the world like cries of acute terror. The King in Orange's presence rewards ignorance as much as ambition and walls off mental acuity in favor of smirking lies. If hate can be cultivated in a human garden, then he has watered it deeply.