I was bored, fed until my belly was sore, and born with plenty of cold water to flush my pores.

The age hides under rituals for maker evaders and this pretty ghost with thick skin makes his quiet living.  

The drive looked just like any other day, the signs read the same, windows spit out the same shapes, and the radio played the same waves. The expressway, once a fertile parade, is now a dejected eye pain to the entire state. He looked on it all with the same disdain and ended every day boring– a commitment out of pity or shame, it’s all the same. 

I see men in vibrant uniforms that resist their environment, rolling on new paint making a scene on the interstate hanging billboard art for a foreign country that doesn't have the time to waste, left to be unseen where it’s displayed.

Enticing. It’s pulsating like it contains a heartbeat, urgently directing me with the intrigue of a yellow vow. 

“Less than one mile, your new lease on life!” 

It’s spirited and certain, a vascular wrist tells my fortune. I reached out of body, lurching and rerouting. 

I have time considering I’m who pays me; following its instructions ceremoniously. To use such a font so boldly it must be immensely trustworthy. I must take a look and see, at least a peak. 

Boasting clearly, a portent of my resurrection.

“For the first time, have EVERYTHING you need!” 

That sounds nice. As if I don't already. 

As I entered the long drive I was showered with high-intensity lights, a runway for every loser in the fight. I was approached at my window by a man wearing white and smiling like he's lost his sight far past me in that ugly desert. He looked below my nose intentionally. The others standing like deer in the pasture, stationed in their own curated grunt, ambivalent mutts busying their eyes with the searing sun. 

“That yellow machine there– that's any man's dream. I think it's calling your name. What's your name again?”

“It’s –”

“Well, friend. This beauty speaks to me always and I think it’s your lucky day. Would you like to take her for a spin?”

I couldn't decline, I wasn't given the opportunity. This all happened very suddenly.

I was ushered with urgency, transcending the pleasantries, and distanced from my newly defined atrocity, my gallant steed compared unfairly by the not so complimentary stable. They held my head like the president, directing me with precision in evanescence, guiding me to consolement. 

“Just to aid your getting in–” 

He placed his palm atop my head, brushing my back. The magnetic field reacted so that I plunged into a perfectly crafted gorilla hand. I hadn't said more than two words yet.   

The seat fit me flawlessly, when my hands rested in front of me I felt the power they mentioned, my soul adjusted, and I saw all the groupers breaking their necks just to see my entrance– in my new brilliance. My hips fastened and my eyes wrinkled to disrupt the forces, I took her wide open, and watched in admiration as everything I’d known turned to sand flowing down my hand into the wound I kept scabbed  The wind touched each hair on my head and cradled my spine, flowing through me with the comb created in the symbiotic relations between our history of life. I saw the light, greased the palms of the man on the inside. It taught me that I'd forgotten everything I derived, and most importantly lived with my hands by my side. I’d entirely missed the punchline. I forgot to live, and now I’d just died. He was right, I'm alive. 

Not wasting another moment on the cusp of sublime, this new bright light.

“This is where It hides. I need it officially mine.” 

 In the time it took for me to complete a weight-evaporating sigh, I was back in the stage lights under that bright new sign of life.

“I’ll take it.”

They smiled and led me with open palms to the office with starships. 

“The lot is for the window shoppers that left their wallets at home. Here is where the real men are grown.” He smiled like he fixed these muscles with his fingers in the nighttime. Strutting exaggeratedly like a mime. I think he truly did have poor eyesight.

I signed, and signed. Signing away a surprisingly insignificant amount of papers and shaking not one stern hand but four, I was handed my new lease in the form of an envelope. At the cheap cost of time, I was leaving with God on every side, his perfectly assigned design. I look through her hindsight and their waves reflected through the mirror like stage closing signs, their bodies grew small in stature until they were miniature and eventually disappeared. 

So invigorating I took a mental picture.

“This is living,” I said to her.

The wheel spun left and it soared fast with her sounds thundering out from under the gas– I caressed her on the lap, we became acquainted and gagged and spat at the fools we immediately surpassed.

“All those unimpressive jacks, I stamp them into the past. They lack the passion and the antidote we have in flask; our neat beverage in the glass of man– I can finally see I was one of them, and I’ll never go back!” 

I didn't give a rest until the clouds rolled in and paused above my head. We took that as a hint to get off on the real spin, a prelude to the beginning, the fantasy of the wishing kings.   

I took the next exit and brought her to a crawl in the first town where I'd let the people fawn, providing the richest spoonful for all the mouths in awe. As we made our way around, the inhabitants started slithering out of their holes and we saw more and more of them as we got close, all busy and unprovoked. Not exactly repulsive individuals, more unremarkable, common folk, but they all dodged each other like they know something I don't. They act unimpressed but I know they’ve noticed, they act decent, not overly interested, composed in the presence of an alien– all but one man. I captured his attention like a moth to light, met him with my humblest and most honest connection, and he brought my eyes to a full open, releasing the blinds to the ceiling. He didn't even try to hide his fascination. 

He was positioned with a sign, and toting his lush life with a bottle of silver bullet, right outside the market. I rolled by, parked, and exited like a star in disguise. Crafting my stride to a carefully focused glide, keeping my hips at his gaze so that I could naturally pass by– he might just tell me what he liked. We crossed lines at the shoulder and he waved his change catcher.

“Spare a dollar? Sir…”

His teeth rotted through his lips and his bone almost broke through the skin. Half-covered eyes, still protruding like a fish.

“I don't have anything on me.”

He stared like he didn't believe me. 

“I’m sorry. I don't carry–”

His eyelids flashed blankly, unwavering, observing like he lies lateral to the soil in their manufactured city garden, but he doesn't. He sits perfectly in lotus, perpendicular to the seed soon to be flowers, perpetually in wait for the next second. He then spoke with conviction.

“Is that a new accessory of yours?”

Eyes lighting under the paparazzi.

“It is! Do you like it? Fresh from the lot this morning, like nothing you’d ever seen! Flies so fast on the open route, I can barely breathe. It’s a shame to have to leave it, even for this minute. Just look at it… Even shines without the rain, believe me.”

The decrepit muscles effortlessly turned without enthusiasm and back like a specter. 

“Does it accompany misery…”

This caught me. I stepped off the curb and had to catch myself like I wasn't unnerved.

“I’m sorry?”

He blinked like a dog.

I blinked perturbed.

“I don't know if I understand. There’s nothing miserable about her?” 

His jaws unclasped like they were locked, but all he said was–

“I see you in leather, will you be wearing that forever? How do you feel when it’s on the floor? Alone in your God-given skin... how will you feel when you’re away from her? I see the time on your wrist tell’s half past four.”

Am I missing something, is he starting at the end? He finally lowered his head and released his vice; only enough to give a breath.

“Whatever your riddle is, it doesn't sound like your business. I have no change, and frankly the patience. I'm in a hurry, so please– pardon me.”

I tried to move the tree and maybe bring my chest back to the surface. His force gripped and strengthened, attached to the spool unwinding faithlessly. An invasive being fills the breadth of the soliloquy and owns my focus like a wreck on the beaten street. 

“I'm asking you, sir. If this minute of pleasure follows you even when you’ve long exited the door, the leathers fast asleep on the floor, and that fossil on your wrist doesn't tick anymore. Do you feel full, or bored?”

Daggers in my vision, a headache in my possession; left to stay quiet in submission while his antic finishes. He paused to pull a smoke out of his breast pocket, the urgency of a musket. Picking himself up where he left it with a long drawn and cutting punctuation. 

“Can you drive this car all your life? When you take the long walk outside, she can't follow you all the time– certainly not. Who is in front of me when she's not attached? I think it's the man I see through, with thick skin, carefully altered to perfection, skin glistening. If I do, others too. But not you?”

My cheeks flushed and I shuttered with disgust. A poor attempt at instigating a proper gentleman with only his beautiful husk and intentions. I tried to be kind.

“I know myself perfectly and you know nothing of me, no matter what you think or see, you don't. This coming from a man begging for leftovers outside a fort of ingredients, with nothing to show in his jar. Believe me, I’m as happy as I need to be. Now please, excuse me.”

I shrunk and slid by the toll taker, and he uttered behind me with sharp clarity.

“Believe me.” Hinting insincerity. 

I acted like I didn't hear it. Carrying by him slowly; stripping naked in my skin with all eyes on my thin frame. 

When I left it was at the different entrance to avoid the hermit. Scrambling between the slippery patrons trying to assimilate going the opposite way, a stray in the rain, it falls heavier when I’m shamed. My pace a trot, and my arm angled for cover– my eyes returning to where he sat like he's the hunter and I'm the runner. 

I savagely reached my shelter, and I peered over her top for a final affirmation that he was still dying, my stomach still diving. He stayed motionless, his face drooping like he was sleeping, his forehead seeming concentrated and his form never softening, his spine erect as a sword blade. 

Separated from the rain I sat waterlogged and soaking empty-handed. I stared into my face in the mirror, the jury, it showed me my eyes red with pressure and wet without tears. My HUD distorted while engaging. 

“He’s a fool to question me, assess my accessories as if they’re shallow for displaying like they’re useless until they’re decaying... as if I’m missing something of so much importance only a bum has its coordinates. I have a word for people like him and it's a shame.”

I shaved off the humiliation and cleared my face, the hair on my arms porcupined.

“I'm sure he questions all the others that drop two tears in his hollow bucket, I can't be the only misfortuned. He’s a cancer. I can ignore him easily– just look at him, he's barely a shape. I spit in his ugly face.”

It spattered the windshield, and I wiped her gently in apology. I looked out the passenger window trying to see, and invoke karma for his already bottom feed.  

“I’ll make him believe me, here is a maximist turned minimalist out of authority, I can disprove his preaching with resolve, I have no need to leave this car. I can choose unconformity and free all the hogs and watch his eyes unfold, I could know nothing but her company under the walls, and I’d die in her comfortably to owe only for my faults. The leather would sear and grip until I am her and she is me, and in eternity we serve each other beautifully. Forgetting what’s misery and bringing a symphony wherever we may be! I’ll show him. Believe me.” 

The thought of my life and my living in a metamorphosis, man to accessory, man half machine. It electrified me and brought in a hot air to breathe. I fixed her mirror to show the world before me, no longer unsavory, but color sourcing, the past we can always look back to see. And we left in a sort of synergy, still too new to believe. 

I passed the man once and for last– more of a statue barely breathing, a praying mantis; stone in his lotus configuration. He never noticed my revelation, and he blurred into the background seemingly insignificant.

“That sad sack will wish he never questioned me. Not an inkling of what discovery he’s made by proxy.”

Full on fuel and starved of burden we entered our commitment and fatal sentence.

“Idiot! First thing I've met worth pitying. I win, let him chew on his nothing!” 

Screamed into the sweeping environment, doused with the sweating clouds, and twinkling for the love of God. All of my worries vanish, and all the banality of routines slip into the vortex of the ground I distance. My heart opened up to bear witness to the extravagance of a limitless existence. 

The lotus attended as no more than a fly in the part of my memory where only the loiterers visit, he offered up his uncovered life for a cushy moment in the spaceship, muted. He became so quiet that he had to watch to answer his questions.

Feeling as though my wings hold the strength of the sky, venturing too far into the mouth of the great expansion, I know that I’ll forget to die– but that's for the wanderers with retreating footprints to devise in the papers, we don't die. I control the concept of time in my straining palms, the leather wheel like a clock I spin all the way around. The thought of any natural or primal need so far beneath me it was buried in hades. She spoke so gently it soothed me into a ruminating air castle where I lived sweetly in the cacophony of dream speech. With sugar on my tongue and plaque on my teeth. My only mission was that of a shaman or charlatan, I couldn't get close enough to determine– the idea in itself was enough to label me a spiritual variant; victor of salvation. I craved only to prove nothing meaningless.  

The high cooled to a light breeze, and as the sun found cover behind the monolith– we found ourselves on the equator of Elysium tracing our marks just over the line of realism, balancing fiction with religious terrorism. 

The trees without the sun are shaped like resting giants with their arms slung over one knee in reprieve. As dusk slipped on like a nightgown we toyed with the idea of a legacy, flirting with what we may scrawl for the epitaph– to be visited in tribute by all that will be next following our path. 

“One day we’re quoted for saying things like these, or making drawls like those, believe me.”

She purrs under the absence of others like us. 

The ecstasy eventually mellowed and covered my emotion in a fine coat of heaven, gathering me back to the present. It brought me down from the ladder I had summited and placed me directly in the center to view it optimally, and truthfully. Here I submitted. The world grew legs, and I watched in fear and admiration. 

“What we are to witness. I can only take in so much of it. I can’t place the right phrases, it doesn't do this justice; my God.” In astonishment.

So expressive and slow that it's almost lifeless. To interpret it– one can't even imagine it. I had to breathe to digest it.  

As I partly regained my bearings for the first time, I questioned the longevity, but only briefly. 

“I have nothing to eat; a tank at half capacity– how do I not leave?”

I said it jokingly. Spoken to her dashboard bright with enlightenment, showing me something for her thanks for being free.

“It isn't so dire, not yet. Let us continue to dream out this forsaken mess.”

It went to a corner of my mind, and we pulled off onto the side in the dirt that burst into a flourish like confetti, all-encompassing, then slowly vanishing to reveal us stalled in absolute luxury. With such an entrance we tuned emotion accordingly, listening to the words of geniuses in dilapidated yet expensive leather dialed in at the highest level. As the stars came into the night one at a time I closed my eyes. What crept into my mind was that my bed feels like a dentist's chair, and my legs are numb and need air. I rolled the window until it became a cavity in my six-cylinder, back pressed up against the center console, and legs went up and elevated into the cold desert; peaking like the stage performer to his audience. I talked to her like a friend. 

“I’d never met joy, is it the same as happiness? Which one is permanent? Or permitted?” 

We laugh.

“I wonder– it has to be close to this.” 

She blinked behind the wheel with a light. This must be her eyes.

“Can you drive this car all your life? It makes my stomach tight, a stitch in my side.” 

Snorted into the waking night with the stars coming into their forms. Pleasantly reclined staring at the ceiling wishing she had a sunroof, fingers interlaced in my hair.

“This is where we decide to die, there's something cinematic in it… poetic… natural and freeing– a sort of contentment. I can finally say I'm shaken enough to wake out of all of this nonsense.”

He stretched his shirt and shook his wrist. She blinks at the same frequency always but is interested. It's evident in her nervousness.

“We’re much less than people now aren't we, we’re ideas turned from imaginary to barreling down the streets. A force to be reckoned with, we make our own way with gravel in our teeth, reconnaissance for the next generations, we’re something beautiful now wouldn't you say? I’d say. They’ll read of me– the pillar of your living majesty. The pioneer of the mad seed.”

My head lifted slowly. As I lay like this I grew more and more restless. 

“We haven't seen anything yet. Just a taste and the fruit is rich with nutrients! There's a whole world to underestimate and we’ve only scratched the surface. Shall we?”

I shot up and in one motion the key turned in the ignition and my eyes were engulfed in flame.

“Quite regenerating, but I want to feel this metal meteor cut through like the Concorde! Maneuver the sliced gaps in the atmosphere, and take a moon bath later. Take me to the king of this dream! I’d like to show him something he wouldn't believe.”

A laser divides the rock and mountains with fervor painting the streets like a race track, the meshing of red and white colors cutting out a map, a light show for the angels confined by their wingspan– splitting the firmament with my wrapping claw, pushing her to the wall. Her eyebrow rose until almost falling off, my dimples touching my own like the jester; the fool with his finger on the pulse. 

Then in the space of a gasp. We left the ground, frozen in space just as a horse vault.

Even the time I’ve spun in circles halts, the moon fits my skeleton, and the pumpkin gulps. 

And with the friction of a snap, we collided body to earth. She rattled, violently shaken. The tires painting the pavement. 

I went for the door like a madman swallowing nausea, and as it opened into the darkness I was reluctant, I thought better of it– and stared a million miles off into the still internment I outwitted. Free of scratches with all that happened– just strength training. I'm immune. 

“I just need a moment.”

A crack big enough to fit my neck through made me a giraffe. My head faces the reclusive desert-scape, retreating as I focus– tender blisters wiping away the perspiration that comes with an overly ambitious bite. The arctic breeze loved my red skin like an ice pack from mother, forcing all my color to leave and go elsewhere. Hazards like a flare in the vacant wild signaling the testing site for the barrier height, I stared into my hands like a magician holding the portal to his disappearance. The drum of my heart set the music to my mind's reenactment. I am weightless like a feather, I am infinite when I measured.

The alarm of her lifeline sounded. Back to the present. My breast weighted. 

I pulled myself back in to face her eyes, my spine cracked audibly from how I bent, she’d never spoken so abruptly. A new light on her. She's nearly empty.

“How could I be so oblivious, how hadn't I noticed! Swanning like a daredevil while she's drying.” 

We fled urgently to fuel her belly, and almost instantly a sign guided us to safety. The numbers beside the decimal did not interest me, I've already put my life in the pool– I'll give anything. Taking the first turn in what felt like a panic induced eternity, we finally rejoiced with the living. The lights are vivid and fluorescent, I even saw a person using his legs for leverage, but I couldn't wink on autopilot. 

I invaded the awning as a madcap ambulance, in desperate need to resuscitate my comrade. The man at the far other end stared as I entered without a head. I rolled her in, critical now to operate. 

I had to crawl into the backseat so that I could stretch through the window with as much of me inside. I barely reached the nozzle, getting my fingertips just enough contact to bolster the metal. I watched her smaller eyebrow grow into a full rainbow through the gap in the headrest. I breathe shallowly with relief. The near-death of your closest sparrow. 

I threw the hose to the land to lay disconnected, the garden snake all wrapped around and left inanimate for another to take.

“I think we need a rest, that's enough excitement for the day, much less the night. A hell of a flight.” 

We made camp at the first opportunity with enough separation from the town, dirty and bathed in those ugly lights. We only need what's natural, my only light needs be the mobile that spins and extends out from underneath the rowing clouds. The glow underneath the door, every time you wake from night terror to tell your mother, a small silhouette breaks right there, for her eyes to wake and know. 

My slumber snuck in completely bare and took me in the chair. 

The store light flickered beneath my eyelids, sending in a blanket to cover my senses, entering only through complete darkness. 

In the time deconstructed, Ra appeared before me, and a hellstorm seeped in– and the dream interpreted. An attack on Earth's protective skin. Shake, the ruble tumbles and falls in every direction. I fall into a lower region, trembling, closer in feeling. The light breaks further in, I feel the sides quarreling. I awake, pyrrhic victory, stomach sobering. The salivating and tongue bending in my drifting made my mouth fowl. My mind dismembered into the fall of a puzzle.

“I need a meal.”

 That's feeble, no. Hunger is nothing, I'll feel better once we’re moving. The sun is shining. 

“What's the time darling? I can't see it through your glasses fogged.”

I’ve already started disintegrating. When the seat went into the upright position, I immediately caught the fish in the predicament of land breathing. The sunshine freckled my cheeks and blew out my pupils, eclipsing the pretty whites in their surroundings. I feel my bones itchy or tingling, covered by paper-thin reptile skin.

“Deep breaths. What's on the docket for this most beautiful day?” 

Her body a magnet still slightly wet. My hands caressed her cold inside, the provocative curvature dressed in cool leather brought me back to life in a teaspoon bite, leaving my fingers damp. As the morning thick lifted I saw what we lived in. A majestic settlement with wired birds and wide-spread greens, and a suspicion that my eyes limit me. The only thing missing is coffee. 

“Okay, I think I'm back to stay. I'm sorry, sometimes after I wake I find I've fallen too far away, and my head goes topsy-turvy. You look cold?”

She's a painting of blues and browns with a scarlet jumper, the colors of her pressing up the mountains on a platter, horn locked with the celebrity on earth; it engaged a part of my brain I’d have seen sooner if I knew of her.

“You know how to set a scene. We look like the fantasy beyond the beer boards. Where are we? I’ve never made it so far to the parts unexplored, where are the rest of them? A place like this must always be packed to the brim like a museum! The early birds… must be.”

We had to separate painfully, I didn't want to leave before the crowds came, but we have much to see. 

Sliding on the snake's belly through the rocks split into two plateaus, the enormity doesn’t escape me, I roll as a penny. For the first time, it isn't unflinching, it’s teasing with provocation, inviting glimpses to a world behind the overgrown things– showing gold glints between the cracks. Picturesque, yes, but only attainable by the fleeing west guns. Now I'm in it in an awesome paralysis as one, a western gun with his accomplice, escaping into the canvas prints.

His wrinkled face visits me with an incanting puff of smoke to prick away, but I have sanity in his way.

“How will you feel when you’re away from her?” 

Blushing pleasantly. Embarrassed for him.

“A joke, it's funny! I’ll never be. Sing with me!”

He didn't, she did. He listened. 

Echoing songs from overseas until my lips bleed– wet them and sing with my teeth and knees. 

We cut a fire into the sweet spot of the country. The storm clouds traded natural places with me, my eyes turned pools that tell the future in ripples, ripping right through the apple like the red shark in the patch… and this went on for I think months. The time was a concept I no longer invested in– until I slowed with God’s toll, and we rowed with battered oars and piss-misting winds, the drunk showing up to lunch in the evenings. Frail and useless, fueled with the reserve left in the stow for your grandchildren. Wondering how wrinkles grow; his skin evaded that collateral without going old.

In my belongings, I had forgotten a clock, and my watch was always a flaunt, it never passed half past four. The decorated hanging for the thin wrist kissing the door with the sun melting it into permanence. 

I fit into the role of an artifact passing over the phantom moor, cheek dry under the blooming clouds spitting lasers from the mouth of a savior. 

With our relentless fist, I lost my white water skin and my beard grew big, my legs a bone's width. In that telling mirror, I see a skeleton smiling rich with age on his grin.         

I’ll continue coming back to what he said when my lips are lazy, and split, but don't unstick. I add only enough space for him to exist. My side is just the cage I can't seem to fit.

We drove until I couldn't muster the strength to control the wheel, pulling off onto a shoulder to rest every other mile. Teeth yellow from dirt and air corrosion, if happiness isn't dimples extending beneath the flesh and anchoring their furrowed brows, I don't know what it is. The lost street paver stumbling, mumbling with a lisp in perpetuity, happy that now every passer sees an indisputable something. Wry and whittled as a little white sin

“Let's stop right here, It looks like a battle scene.” 

It was all empty. A level, unvarying landscape. Tumbleweed and cactus intermingling. He’s lost more than direction. 

“That crater over there, that must've been a cannon. You can see it from how the land clotted; do I feel sick?” His wrists shook as he spoke and tested his forehead with the back of his hand.

“I feel swoll. Anyways, that's how the ground soaked. It choked up. They won a great lot, I can tell. It fired right there, it must’ve. Precisely. It fired from right there.”

His sounds chardling, trying to enunciate his words through the cotton in his throat. Pointing a flimsy cardboard indicator in the wind, his degrading finger. 

“A glorious field that grows the dead into souls. If I die today I was happy. I capture the banner for the Vestibule if it's where I’m going, and I live along them; It felt good to rove. I regret nothing. The event is to be told by mouths at tables, so much so it will be known to bring with it a cold. Once our story has been told it will spread like a fire in a straw town. We’ll take the beanstalk to the troposphere to watch. I'm feeling too tired to talk, I think I'm better off to let go with my dignity whole. This pretty thing is no hospital view.”

My guide in shades. My Beatrice. Both looking more weathered these days; our lumping chords can't take one more dodgy escape. 

“When did living become work, not before, it was before, but after– you know what after, yes. Fled far from the north and with fresh skin– when did I get so far? Nothing of worth is such a thankless chore. How did this become not so much in the way an eagle blows? I haven't had a drink in ages.”

He spit green and cloudy mucus, it spread itself into a notch like a spore in the dirt. 

The tide is turning some more. That door now looks like any other. The business suit, freshly pressed on my father, was a clever burrowing creature. It led me to this once-dreamt door-turned window.

“If I squint, these look like pyramids. Can I join your greatness?” I asked them, neck angled.

“I'll abandon whatever it takes, it’s all leeches anyways, it's simple. My one request is that you don't make me open the door. I can't leave, I can be monumental here in my houndstooth chair, ten toes planted on her core, trust this. With her hair trigger, we’ll be watching this place forever like you. We could do it even better, not that it's a competition, but like this we can be very quick and act like a guardian. This is a loop we’ve lived in, and it would be an honor to leave in. The spectacle is yours, I don't need the sun any more than her. We’ll be more like this, I promise.”

The skeleton does the talking, no outer coating, no feeble euphemisms, only desperate kneading. He pleads to the comets in the self-imploding frame.

“Assure me before my leaving! My body is not the same as my memory. Tell me! I know it's all failing, but I don't feel any attempt at remembering. I need to know I did something. Paint it with a bolt of lightning that sparks the fail-safe before detonating, a gust of wind carrying a worm with its dinner, or a car passing with passengers intent on what he's performing. It has to be undeniably convincing, something so compelling it stops my heartbeat like a guillotine. Give me a sign of my preserved purity, or this was futile and all of nothing. What I believed to be the enjoyed luxury for my laboring, was only an accelerant for my debasement, and I marched without even knowing it. Please, all I ask is that your gift is in the physical so that I can believe it. It’s all I need to know before I accept your treatment.”

All that displaced scarring now a full body covering, a dictator turned to the beggar at the mountain feet. No food or real clothing. Intergalactic catalyst, more of a casket, red. 

“Is this what it feels like to be alone? I’ve never been dead before.”

The days have an age also, and his voice climbs barely enough to be classified as so.

“A road should suggest travel, but there's no one. Even I have stopped, so now what does it have? A hot blacktop for worms to burn. I see through the sun reflector that I’ve spent all my leisure and I must spoil. That's what's for fun if I’ve had it too long.” 

The sounds of the rain pelting the market, and his lotus unashamed wrung through his brain, a mantra played that he won't face to face.

“I can go for one more day. Yes, I'm surely a man of that much strength left.”

And he felt his way into the morning another time with his finger neatly balanced upon the man ender, just awaiting a note from the sender. 

He woke, a matador in his cloak. Eyes bloated. Dry tongue sloped and fluttering out dreams of the premature ghosts.

“This will be all the most. The day we weep.” 

His brain couldn’t string together what was meant to be his declaration of the hereafter. He lays his God figure in the dirt to walk away into the ether without the man-given feature. There are no ropes or stairs, or will. His voice did grow. 

“If I'm not to know, I’ll go on with the most expensive horse in the show. The fool and the audience only know the jokes, they laugh and I swallow.”

He proved the design and executed it only as a God couldn't. The eremite pleased with his drink and instinct. The gravedigger of the following generation. 

The sheer velocity took everything that was left of him, skin seared off like a pyre igniting her from within. 

It all went by quickly when I tried to remember one minute specifically. One day. One journal entry. Nothing.

Each straining grasp brought closer his final disappearing act. 

All the battle scenes and fine dust erupt in time for the ultimate drug. 

“I won't live long enough to see us stop. You’re everything I've drunk? I’ve killed only for your blood, not our love. After this we don't exist, but in the form of spirits that rape the sin of leisure. Let us finally see what we’ve missed!”

The bullet whizzed through space and time, left with pretty fractals in the eyes. Reaching the height where it's most important that you die, he knows what he sees on the other side. One last hoorah for the fight of his life, in the future of his final goodnight. He breaches the barrier of lightness and leaving everything behind becomes immeasurably pointless. No longer in person–  

The skin, what was left of it, clean like a fish, charred; The red meat tissue dark and sticking to the foundation. Burned bright with reverence. Just like he intended; but it comes like a wind, in which he holds no resilience, sprouting from the decaying mind he handled like a wishing bone. 

“What is happiness without reverence? A two-party sentiment, someone must bear witness. even its corpses!” 

Losing his grip he abided and let his hands fall on top of his pockets. Letting her fill the final nail and run off with his promises. His eyelids took the weight of it and dropped, and she guided them to a world where everything he saw he forgot. His consciousness slipped out before he could notice. Spending his moments like pennies in the plaza fountain rich with many. He took the deepest inhale he could, filled with creosote and earthly lemons. He gave his permission and resigned. Happy or not knowing, his lungs expanded and he went peacefully with the hope that he gave enough time. Believing some other forms will tell him when he crosses over, that that was a life. The shark soared, fiery and glorious, and disappeared after an arch of light into the expansive abyss teeming or scarce with life.