Gauntlet Runs

Oh, you will suffer. No doubt about it, you will be ravaged and exhaused and fooled until you learn to deny your basic cravings. Sin is suffocating, clouding your next step with tainted illumination, and prepare for evil doorways to beckon you inward with offerings of respite; plainly spoken, you cross the threshold of this den and you will be the spider's dinner. You will die or wish you were, for your path will have ended with one false presentation or another...nevermind what sucked you in to lose the plodding ahead...finding only regret is left to ridicule your soul-lacking bones for eternity.

Morning light peeks gently through the slit of my shades, pinning the cat in the corner in spot-lit grooming, and my nightmares evaporate into the versions that are real, visceral, kniving and biting: the new day begins. Prayer splashes me in the shower, words of the Bible train me in patience on my commute of bus and train, but the path is slippery, perilous even, but remember that it is not destined.

Narrowly

The shadow-draped corner, stalled now by the guy with a similar hat who snaked into the bathroom and shut the door before I could react, now was teeming with seven hefty, imposing, unsmiling bouncers who knew only that their target of inflicted pain was a "dude in a hat" and there I stood. The long-haired narc grabbed my arm and whispered, "Get Out Of Here!" and I looked into his face with shock, followed by quick panicky comprehension. The bathroom door opened, dude's hat emerged preceeding his form, and I slipped carefully between the hulking forms of angry, violent men before the screams and meaty pounding sounds and the squirt of red, alcohol-thinned blood splashed. My cuz and my dumbass, blessed again.

Exposed Film

Straining the poisons between two eyeballs, a pair unfocused, seeps a little death left, half contrite right. This draft is whiplashed words slit onto the expressed page; I'm broken but in that suction down I glimpsed her. I connected with her; remember that amid the daily strangling, under the bouncing of battering, when the onlookers sneer and whisper. Think on the beauty of the scenery during the headlong plunge over the cliff, for it is a one-time viewing, and your flight will either splash red or surface to amazement and awe.