“Tell me,” said the Young Man, “tell me.”

“Tell me of the Devil.”

“Oh, the Devil,”

spoke the Poet. “Of him I speak with foul mouth

and forked tongue. For when it comes to Devils,

who can speak the truth?”

*   *   *

A lone man alone, remote in his perversion,

honed in upon his own self-pleasure,

self-centered on the center of his own self,

this Devil has snagged his soul in a noose.

Hooped over in a loop, twisted and bent,

his mind and mouth deformed, reformed to form

a conjoined single-purpose pleasure apparatus

body contorted, diverged from human form,

cloistered in self-worship, his cracked mind

wanders on a twisted pleasure path,

sequestered in mad obsession of

self-consuming passion or rabid addiction

to hedonistic compulsion.

Forsaken and forsaking all society,

this Devil has found Devil’s work

for idle hands and idle mouth to do.

Chained in shackles to the conceit of his desire,

the Devil plays the Devil with himself.