Broken and bruised. Scathed. Cut and bled out. A night seen through a Smokey haze, backlit by bare bulbs and reflected through broken glass. Exhaling slowly. A head in the clouds, walking through poppy fields ablaze. Dark skies behind and darker still up ahead. Keep walking. Don’t hold back, let it all out. Stumble. Fall. Get back up as best you can. Wipe away your tears. Keep moving. The smell of creeping death, so still it sneaks up on you. Bitter voices and low sobs. Humming and beeping. Nature held back by technology, at least for a few more moments. Everything could go either way. The binary lottery. Yes, no. Black, white. Life, death. Interesting, disturbing. One man’s trash is another man’s lunch. Dog eat dog, etcetera, etcetera. The same old clichés ring hollow every time. This may be the last time you see this person alive. The overturned shelves, frames, boxes, discs, chairs, tables, the fabric of a life torn in tatters on the floor, doused in your still cooling blood and tears. An existence marked by crime, destroyed by justice, nothing poetic about it. Smoke clings to everything. YOUR world, breaking apart at the seams as life rapidly becomes seemingly unlivable, a constant decent into the dark, all screaming and sharp noises, tears and fears, no air to breath, no light to see by, stumbling in the dark, while THE world just keeps on spinning. Unaware. Breathe in the flames. The helping hand of a good friend, bites as hard as the deep cold of winter. If you’re lucky; the respect and friendship is soon overtaken by the pain and hardship of needing them. Survival through charity. Loss and sadness feels a brief reprieve from the kindness. Their good will. Their respect, their care. Is your need. Your pain. Your failure. No matter whose hands your life is in, good or bad, right or wrong, if they aren’t your own, you will never forget, never forgive, the shame and sadness you feel being cradled back to health. If you’re not lucky, you will never experience this pain. Locked in. The concentration camp of the mind, emaciated and imprisoned, overworked and underfed. Lacking the nourishment of sleep, fearing the fractured fleeting nightmares and screaming at the dawn. What a waste. Emotionally crippled, hobbling on your crutches to get by. Drinking. Smoking. Drugs. Chicks. Guys. Whatever. Two hearts beating as one isn’t romantic, it’s an ectopic skip signifying damage to the muscle. That smell. Love. The most sinister of all consciousness’s. The pain, the self hatred, anguish, sadness and bloodshed over a misaligned mental anomaly among animals. The most misused of all words. Standard suffering not withstanding, the unknowingly self-inflicted wounds in the name of love cut deepest. Such is life. Ashes to ashes. Dust. All the good, bad and ugly fill our screen and its all black and white but only grey matters. We are our own worst enemy. It’s why we are top of the food chain. No animal would waste its fleeting, instinctually driven existence in the same self-conscious, selfish, pointless and fruitless ways we do… But hey. Maybe I am way off. Maybe I should ask my analyst. Am I on a downward, shame spiral of dejected loss and grieving? Darn me. I should get drunk. Why not. You only live once! There is no time like the present. Life is for the living. So let’s get shit face. Let’s go get lewd, loud and crazy. Let’s wake up tomorrow with a newfound sense of regret. Let’s make sure to fill every pointlessly arbitrary calendar new year with a whole host of new, weird and wonderful life lesson based goals like ‘Don’t drink so much.’ Ah  Depression. Hey man. I saved you a seat, here, get close and warm up on me. We’re gonna need each other if we expect to get through this thing in one piece. Wait… It’s a trap! Dang. Scratch all that. Let me restate my original point: Nothing good happened today.