ideally

It doesn’t matter what you have in mind. It doesn’t matter how you choose your words. The hitch in your giddy up, the stone in your shoe, the song in your precious little heart. You don’t get to pick the poison, you don’t get a say at all. The heat rises and the world closes in. Small sad rooms and throw away lives. The ceiling that you fix your mournful gaze upon as dismal as the ragged countenance on display for all to see. The tattered standard of perpetual defeat, the constant contempt and disavowal, all the bitter sins they blame upon your very being. Your existence a filthy, hated thing, the unwritten but long held sacred shibboleth of this wounded world demands your ridicule and sacrifice. The goat left out for God’s demons, the blood price of this foolish compact with a shiftless, burning wind.

Shuffle through the deck of days, picking your wager from empty pockets and stripped down wishes, your life the only marker you have. Day after day, night after night, bad beats and bad breaks and the unending apathy. The separation of help and faith, the shitheel kings and the degenerate priests slaver and thieve, the gutless minions of the gibbering gods they serve set loose upon you at every turn. Any attempt to get aid is either crime or paperwork. Some story to tell you of your worthlessness, some savagery inflicted atop of injury, the directive to give over gelt or die in a ditch. Life is so very precious because of how quick most are to snuff it out.

Ideally I’d be dead by now, not stuck in the ignominy of these words and this world set aflame. Ideally I would never have been summoned to fill the role of scapegoat and other. Instead my breath founders and my head spins. The least labor sets my heart into painful alarm. Naked before the ministrations of the oscillating fan and the staggering brilliance of Miles Davis, I lie here waiting out the day. A strip of bright sun flashing in my open window, stomach growling, no purchase for my wants in this human world. Every day denied three times, even though the centurions are backlogged by years. Behind the children that they murder before they can drink or vote, behind the people with the audacity to think they can be within their skins safely among the wicked death worshipping throng. Behind the ill and the elderly and the readily disappeared, or anyone to be so inconvenient as to really believe in justice or equity. Just another bad stock to be bundled and liquidated as their winning streak gives out. Just another crummy brain waiting for a bullet.