In the serpentine maw of a sun fall begging the good ropes of a life gone wrong fray and bow to snap, photo frames turned down on a table, a guilt like fire, someone stomping in the hallway, Jakob Moo with a knife tip pressed against his throat, a desperate temptation in a flow to darkness.

It had been a long walk in the throes of grayness, a lifetime of derailment. A vessel once made in the flesh now torn asunder in this sea of blood. In a child’s wake left aborted and adorned, sliced like meat in a butcher’s spinning silver moon, the ornaments packed and scattered, memories now too thick to swallow.

Amplified heartbeats. The clicking of an old typewriter on the other side of the paper-thin walls. Jakob Moo drops the knife, and it clatters against the wooden floor. He opens the door to Hades, peers out and searches for foundation.

He steps to the window frame and looks down upon the hive of the city. It’s a clotted yellow smear of digestion and expulsion. Automobiles crawl through the silver light of a bruise. The people parade in lives of pain. There is too much detachment, distraction, disintegration. Love flies like a headwind, branches break, bones snap. Coffee cups rattle in the coming of the great universal God on high. The sun leaks, the stars spin, Jakob Moo tries to breathe. He realizes he has landed in the wrong life.

He whispers to the history keepers and their logbooks of strife. “This should have never been. I should have never been.” The sun is cradled in a ghastly prediction, the hurt of Los Angeles in brick and wire. “You can make this anything.”

He opens the window and puts his body out. He waits for time to pass over him. Death rays spray like spores and sprockets. A fluorescent angel on a silver disc, a galactic gravestone from space. Her eyes are empty white places, her palms littered with stigmata. With emotionless bravado he frays, steps back, gets plain white paper from an incandescent desk. He sits to color with a lone black crayon, forceful sweeps across the blank slate, erosions of a pent-up anger with no explanation. The angel whispers some ethereal epitome, curses his life, his soul. She spits stars and then vanishes into them.

Jakob Moo pins his nonsensical drawing to the wall. He steps back to study it with a sideward tilt of his head. He grunts his disappointment. As it always is. The summary of a derailed life, pitch black misgivings, missteps, mistrials. He now longs for an altered state of being, to become turbo invisible, a nonchalant demigod feasting on peaches of wrath. He steps to the mirror at the beaten armoire. The image there is paladin, wrecked, a titan monarch reflected. The gas of the city turns blue outside. And his guts are like a willow, turning inside out in the wind that never fades.

He goes to the door, but it does not open or close, it is merely shut, silent in its nailed brooding, dusk falls like an emperor, the lights of the city blossom like a bomb. He collapses in a corner, nightshade calling for an endless picture show of dreams, disenchantment directing.

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