_____________________________________________________________________________
---------------------------- I Bleed for This? ------------------------------
------04.07.96-----------------------------------------------------#048------

                       Poetboy Versus the Grain Silo
                                by Snarfblat

It was Christmas morning.  5:00am.  Poetboy hadn't slept all night - he'd
been too excited, thinking about all the amazing toys and candy that were
waiting under the Christmas tree.  Finally, he couldn't stand it any longer.
He jumped out of bed, put on his Power Rangers slippers, and ran downstairs.

To his surprise, there was nothing under the christmas tree.  Nothing, that
is, except a single envelope.  With a tear running down each cheek, poetboy
picked up the envelope and opened it.  

The note read: 

		   Dear Poetboy, 

			  Since you've written so many good
		    poems this year, I brought you a gift
		    too big to fit inside your house.  Look
		    outside in your backyard.

                   			 -Santa Claus 

Poetboy's tears of sadness turned to tears of joy!  He took off his slippers
and put on his glow-in-the-dark Spiderman Hightops, and ran outside into 4
foot deep snow.  Barely able to fight his way through the snow, Poetboy made
it into his back yard.  There, he saw the most amazing thing he'd ever seen.
It was a grain silo!  It was so tall he couldn't see the top, cylindrical,
metal, and, he knew intuitively, filled from bottom to top with the purest
grain he had ever tasted.

The grain silo had a ladder on the outside, so Poetboy began to climb up.  He
climbed for what felt like hundreds of years.  When he got to the top, he
opened the small door and found himself into the grain silo for the first
time.  He was on a wooden platform which ran around the circumference of the
silo at the top, like a balcony around the sea of yummy grain that lay below.

A note scrawled on the wall in blood caught Poetboy's eye.  

"Poetboy: By the time you read this, we will be dead.  Please heed this
warning and get as far away from this grain silo as you can.  Keep going
until you have left the silo far behind you, until you can no longer see our
house.  Run, Poetboy! Run until you've forgotten what town you live in.  If
you stay here, you will live the rest of your life under the horrible curse
of this grain silo.  RUN! Now!  Run until your wimpy poet legs break, until
the soles of your Doc's are worn through and your feet begin to bleed, run
until your pathetic Poet constitution gives out and you collapse.  Only then
will you escape this grain silo's evil influence.
		Love, Mom & Dad."

Poetboy got out his notepad and pen and began to write a poem:

"The grain of the caustic winter night...
 leaps into my cloistered coffin.
 crusty nutsy dusty rusty
 nails dig into the establishment..."

He'd only written the first few lines when the grain below him started to
spin, like a 1000 foot deep whirlpool made out of grain, spinning.  As it
spun, he could see further and deeper into the grain silo until, at the
bottom, he saw the dead bodies of his parents lying in cracked,
body-shaped indentations in the concrete floor.  They were bloated from
gorging themselves on grain. Their grotesquely fat bodies were bursting
out of their skin; their hands and feet had already exploded and were now
formless piles of human gore and grain.  Their inflated stomachs
threatened to break open any minute and cover their bodies with
half-digested grain.  As Poetboy watched, this did in fact happen.  First
his dad, then his mom shook slightly, then their chests ripped open with a
sound like a sheet being torn in half.  Their bodies were covered with
their stomach acid, which worked away at other areas of their skin. This
in turn caused grain-saturated blood to erupt from their eye sockets and
lower intestines, until the silo echoed with the popcorn-like sounds of
rapidly exploding bodies, and Poetboy's wails of agony at the loss of his
parents.

Poetboy reached down and scooped up a handful of grain, and brought it to his
mouth.  As soon as the grain touched his lips, he lost control of his
muscles.  No matter how hard he tried to stop, he found that his arms were
intent on grabbing all the grain he could find and shoving it down his
throat, or sometimes into his eyes.

The grain silo began to shake in its foundation and echo with evil laughter.
A disembodied voice in Poetboy's mind spoke to him.

"Poetboy, ever since you could talk, you filled the world with your feeble
attempts at poetry.  It was either predictable cries against man's inhumanity
to man, or some random "modern art", freeform garbage.  You are utterly evil,
stupid, retarded and weird.  You have no right to continue."

As the demonic grain silo uttered its last sentence, Poetboy felt his muscles
tighten for one last time.  He involuntarily climbed over the walkway's
railing, balanced for a moment, then plunged headfirst down into the depths
of the silo.

Nobody on the block liked the Poet family.  Nobody missed them.

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