Edgy's Gantry

When he heard the odd shouting, Edgy Firestone dismounted his metallic blue Fuji
10-speed, chained it to a rusty and weather-worn guard rail, and entered the tent.
He had seen it from the top of a hill, a newly pitched expanse of canvas now
browning the rural grassland of his beloved Kansas countryside, along with
the many vehicles parked ‘round like ants consuming a sugary residue.

Edgy entered to find a crowd of young and old alike enthralled
upon folding chairs lending an ear to none other than Elmer Gantry.*
At least that was the first impression to crystallize within his cranium.
Firestone was staid, well-mannered, a skeptical young man of few words.
Let me give this Elmer a listen, Edgy thought, parking it on an available chair
next to a middle-aged couple whom he graciously acknowledged with a gentle nod.

Edgy’s Gantry continued his bluster, that old con cultivated through time,
that ugliness which tears man in two, that which divides, that which feeds on fear.
Under the guise of revival, religion once again was ripping the very fabric of reason.
I have to hand it to him, Edgy thought, for he taps into emotion so well, he moves like
some cloud-dwelling saint, waving that old book, entering into the primeval fear-nooks
of the gullible, wrapping them like twine around his almighty righteous authority,
dragging them through the muddy troughs of their own being-born depravity,
selling them on a disease and then poisoning them with the cure.
To you, you charlatan, Edgy thought, green you are not. 

“Pie in the sky?"  Edgy asked as he calmly approached the stage.
Then Edgy’s Gantry, with the usual condemnation and threat,
amid utterances fractured and crawling with broken limbs,
portrayed the self-righteous advocate as Edgy grinned.

24 Lines
Writer’s Cramp
5-9-13

Requirements:
--shouting
--tent
--crowd
--green
--sky

*Elmer Gantry, a novel by Sinclair Lewis, tells the story of a young, narcissistic, womanizing college athlete who abandons his early ambition to become a lawyer and an then evangelist.