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It was an empty night by the desk and the heart inverted for the purposes of other people. Chocolate hearts drawn in chocolate chalk melt out there on the stampeding sidewalks. Too tired. Too tired from trying to leap beyond the barriers of all that is right and good. I’ll never make it, in the end, will I. I’ll be another body in a bed and the rows of visitors will come say their rehearsed goodbyes before heading off to some Mexican café for lunch. My eyes will close forever unobtrusive. They’ll burn me up and throw me away and move on to the next. I’m not worth gold in memory.

If anyone ever really knew. The fire in these fingertips. But I’m not even a chalice to spit in, heavenly father, there masturbating behind the altar. I am tik-tok Indian headlock. Those days out there on the Arizona prairies and the majestic treasures of dinosaur bones and petrified wood. Petrified? I’ll show you petrified. Just look back into the annals of my broken-hearted life. But haven’t we all been at the dead end of the road?

I hear so many people talking now about the end of the world while at the same time someone’s biggest concern has something to do with French fries or a prescription drug or a habitual molestation of the mind. I have no kin kind. Those things called family have taken off to space. I wish I could join them on some spiraling yellow planet with rings… But then again, I would just as eagerly take the crashing waves of memory.

And the world won’t even bother to know this. Some other’s words mean more. Somehow like hot dogs on a steel machine slowly turning in some shit life convenience store on the edge of a town with no soul. To ever think I would be there again. Me. Corroded like a vampire with rust on his wings. Me. A voodoo skeleton frosted in flesh. Me. A stock market number. A file. A digital memory. A frozen half-love. Left to die alone in a January Midwest storm of near snuffing it engagement.

Fornicating memories strike horror show in my dreams, and I awake with a scream. Love turned Titanic. Iceberg asphalt and body skids down the yellow lines of disturbed antelope dreams. Lunging forth like a prep school foil. College. To be that Rolex on the wrist. Yeah. Maybe I can’t continue with that line of thought. It will leave me endlessly basking in a dirty parking lot at dawn with a floorboard full of Russian roulette razors and Spanish bayonets. Mother dashes out the front door screaming at her psychotic son she never meant to birth. He was stabbing the stranger in the stomach with a poison tip. It was something similar to a bee sting.

I was never meant to be here. They should have gone through with the whole keeping me in the oven on Thanksgiving thing. I was going to be stuffed up the turkey’s ass. I was always stuffing, never meat. I was the 8mm mistake quaking on the makeshift screen in the basement. I was the one always watching from the sidelines because I was the one who never trusted the cage. But the cage is where they want you to be. The cage makes you controllable and convincing and good and like a conforming cow waiting to have your teats torn off and tossed aside to the thunder gods.

It’s 10:13 in the p.m. and I am barely there. My heart keeps beating but I don’t know why. My motions are endless, yet I never leave here.