On the city streets, with no direction home
I encounter a friend while wandering a derelict neighborhood. I ask him where his siblings are, and he says they are out of town. The streets are wide and encompassing, the ancient brick buildings towering over us like monuments to a past age. People come out of the rubble to stare and make gestures that are not friendly. We walk and walk until we find a library. Inside, it is clean and bright, a modern marvel of technology. We travel up the electric stairs and stand at a port hole, looking out at the ruins and their angry inhabitants. My friend tells me that a woman is approaching, so I turn and am amazed at her beauty. She has dark skin and long fingers, and eyes that are oval shaped. She says that we are home now, and that the outside is for stragglers. I look through the port hole once more and see a ragged figure dragging its leg. It stops by a fire hydrant, lifts the leg, and urine flows forth. My friend says that he can live with that. I turn back toward her, and I am all smiles.
...
Lost, in some sort of metaphorical and physical abyss
Down and down I fall, darkness surrounding me, my fingers cutting through nothingness as though it were soft, warm, and melting. I can see the faint illumination of stars below me, though they are not celestial bodies, but wandering lost souls, congregating at the bottom of a bottomless pit. My face is still full of human bones; my jacket is my good lambswool pea coat, the one I stole from a department store. Once upon a time, you dressed so fine, you threw the bums a dime, in your prime, didn't you? These words follow me, as though I were the one that wrote them. None of that was me, and if it was, that person has been replaced by a skeletal husk for years now. You can't please everyone all of the time. I reach the bottom of the abyss, though I don't know it.
The men approach, bound in chains, their faces hung. I jump down from my throne, maniacal glee in my eyes. I'm wearing a jean jacket with flair; my face is hawk-like, my hair cut in a mullet. I gesture towards the operational fighter jets, and the crowd standing at attention, machine guns in their arms. "How shall you oppose me?" I ask them, dancing, my feet deft and swift. "There is nothing you can do." Then the crazy one comes in a military truck, dragging an atom bomb behind him, and I have to run before the finger comes out of the sky, the giant hand of God that would detonate the bomb and leave me nothing but an ugly whisper on an ugly landscape.
...
Vanished, in the words of a song
I met you at an open microphone,
You said my voice had a dead-end tone,
So it does, and so it will ever be,
Can I get a number from you to me?
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