Upon a pedestal made of diamonds, you clear your throat and smirk the smirk that knows it’s plated with gold, and you comb your hair back, and back, and back until you can no longer see it.
On your pedestal made of diamonds in the middle of a town made of mud, you preach.
And you kick off your shoes onto the people below and pick your teeth of the money you do not deserve with the justices stripped from those you took it from.
You tell the people of the mud that the coal they mined could be diamonds if they worked a little harder, and waited a little longer.
You tell the people that No One Will Get What They Don’t Deserve, and that there are no handouts, there are no charity cases. That it is each and every one person’s duty to take only what they can afford.
So the people of the mud take the crumbs that fall from the mouth of the Man on the Pedestal. The children eat first. They cry when their swollen tongues touch the dirt-caked wedge of dried out bread, and they cry when their stomachs have nothing with which to be filled, and their throats nothing with which to be dampened.
But you up there on your Pedestal of Diamonds with your smirk of coal and your teeth of opal, do nothing but watch.
Once, you heard a baby crying loudly in the night. You seized the child and the home in which it lived and the Family from the Mud was stoned.
Another time, you watched a poor man steal away with a handful of brown crumbs from the base of your foundation and had the Man from the Mud watch while his family was burned.
When people resisted you and told you that you had Too Much and they, Not Enough, you boomed that the only way to success was to work and that they, the filthy Village in the Mud was full of nothing but tears and ground teeth and the motivation was gone.
Once, atop your jewel-encrusted tower, you saw a glint of fire from the men below you and laughed thunderously at the slender, bony men. You ate a grape chiseled from the finest jade and ordered the unclean savages Back From Whence They Came.
But up clamored the warriors, eyes sunken in and ribs jutting out; sharpened bones of the men left for dead, and the rocks under which they lived in hand. The last thing The Man on the Diamond Pedestal saw were the Amber and Agate eyes of the Men from the Mud, towering over him. From here, he saw what every day they saw and was frightened.
