I clicked on a Buzzfeed link

I clicked on a Buzzfeed link. It felt so bizarre that I felt compelled to write a poem about it. This is in its initial form, so lucky you! You get to see it before I mangle it! (Or, more likely, forget about it for a while, then resurrect it in an almost completely unrecognizable form.)

I clicked on a Buzzfeed link.

It wouldn’t be fair to call it an article. 
Articles have    depth
                         research
         fucking paragraphs.

This was a list, of sorts,
only it wasn’t
made up of words.

It had videos
behaving like looping .GIF files
but with sound.

Each video headlined
with what looked like words
but had no inherent meaning
to me and my English degree.

This was a list of things
ruined by white people,
yet the genocide of the American Indians
is ranked five spots below
Cigarillos.

Vigilantazmo

The door crumbles into a pile of dust, shards, and slivers waiting to implant into the next fool who dares walk through this studio apartment barefooted.

“Oh shit,” Roger—a hired goon tasked with guarding the teenaged ransom victim tied-up and passed out on the sofa bed—says as he spots the crimson-caped wonder—Vigilantazmo. He sets his piece down on the ground and holds up his empty hands. “Look, Mr. Vigilantazmo, I don’t want any trouble here! I’m just a grunt! I’ll do anything you want, just don’t hurt me.” He closes his eyes and braces for pain.

Vigilantazmo lets out a deep belly laugh as he paces toward the Ikea nightstand. “Anything, huh? Then tell me, does this place belong to you?” the super hero asks, stroking the piece of furniture.
Roger opens his eyes and answers, “Ye-ye-yessir.”

“So that means that you own all this furniture,” Vigilantazmo lifts the nightstand up to his eye level and reads the bottom, “including Hemnes here?”

“Look, j-ju-just take the girl! Just don’t hurt me!” Roger pleads, tears mixing with sweat to form a nice face broth.

“I’m not interested in the girl, scum.” Vigilantazmo takes a few practice swings with the nightstand, as if he was next at-bat. “You appear to have been gentle to this child. If only you had been this kind to Mr. Larry Stevens over on Third Avenue.”

Roger scratches his head, soaking up little bits of blood into his finger nails. “I-I-I think y-you have the wrong guy. I don’t know a Larry Stevens.”

“HA! Of course you don’t, slime!” Vigilantazmo walks over to Roger and holds the Hemnes up to his face. A yellow stain forms on the carpet beneath Roger. “He runs, rather, he ran a furniture shop. He did pretty well until greedy pieces of human garbage like yourself started buying your furniture from foreign INVADERS like Ikea.”

“It’s the best I could afford.”

“Don’t try to justify yourself to me. You know, when I discovered that I was all-powerful, capable of doing most anything while possessing but one weakness, you know what I swore an oath to do?” Vigilantazmo pauses, looking up at the ceiling waiting for Roger to shake his head no. “I swore on my adoptive mother’s grave that I will never refrigerate my tomatoes, and to stop FILTH like you from littering the streets again!” He wrenches the nightstand back and strikes Roger across the face, breaking off one of the table legs in the process. He quips, “That’s why you always buy American,” before kicking Roger in the stomach a few times. “Now stay put. I’m not done with you yet.”

Vigilantazmo walks back to where the door once stood and picks up one of the shards of oak. “It’s time to drain that pathetic throat of yours of all its blood. There will be justice for Larry Stevens!”

Roger blindly reaches around the ground until he feels that familiar coldness of his handgun. “It doesn’t have to be this way,” Roger croaks from his broken jaw.

“USA!” Vigilantazmo screams as he runs toward Roger, carrying the wood shard like a primitive spear.

Roger aimed the gun toward Vigilantazmo and squeezed the trigger. Boom. Headshot. The hero fell straight to the ground as his brains spilled onto the carpet, ruining any chance Roger had at getting his deposit back.

“OH MY GOD!” the ransom victim attempts to scream through her gagged mouth.


“I guess his only weakness,” Roger smirks his swollen face, “was a bullet to the head.”