I wait.
For what, what slouching beast towards Bethlehem slinks?
The burning blue sky of winter on a hot empty day on the coast,
Its oppressive expansiveness pushes down on the homes, hearths, and houses.
Alternating from coffee, to beer, to scotch, to cigarettes, and back to coffee...
Recognition, connection, false hopes;
we don't believe in soulmates, and we wait for them, like Santa.
Just as real.
Dream jobs, lottery tickets, death;
and endless list of future pursuits: travel, money, love...
Always in the tomorrow that will come once the sky has been burnt and blackened by the day;
tomorrow will be better.
Different.
But there are no differences in days or months or people.
No tomorrow; no soulmate; no Santa.
Just seconds and minutes marching in an endless line;
carried for the first nine months in a darkened train
we arrive, stripped, assigned, pretending that Belzec is the Balkans.

An easy metaphor; in an apartment, the air a sultry sink, it would be shame if there was any to be had. If you could still feel shame.
But we are born into shame. The rank mix of sweat and drugs and depression and desperation and dreams. Dreams like so many empty condom wrappers scattered on the floor; multitudes, hidden in wastebaskets, under beds, tucked away at the last minute... the unborn future sitting next to us, rotting in a haze of spermicidal gel in a garbage can under that selfsame sun as us. Whose condom are we in? We, the slowly coagulating present?
Our only freedom comes in desolation of our dreams, in our sacrifice of ourselves beneath that empty sky. No trumpet's blow will pull the scales off your eyes. We are blinded by birth. We are Abraham and Issac on that hillside, and there is no god. Just the same empty dead blue sky, the color of a corpses lips, above.

It won't care.
Scream, cry, rage; it will remain. The sacrifice is one of perception, just like the jailhouse, the stoic argument of virtue; easy on the agropolis steps, different in the lion's den.
Because there is no virtue.
But there are lions.

Creation and destruction are fantasies. Action; political, social, economic... movement is no more an anwser than stillness as the slightest blink, like a butterflies wing; your truck breaks down two weeks later. Unrelated?

We surround ourselves with each our own fog, hoping that cruel light of the world outside will not penetrate. Substances, hopes, dreams, plans, a future. Tomorrow.
A haze we hide ourselves in, hiding ourselves from the world, the world from us...
but the day burns on.
Born into Borges lottery. A complexity we can't understand, an absurdity that extends beyond laughter. Fatalism, nihilism... we march in step, aware or not. Each pace bringing us closer and farther from the cataclysm of the duel of the present. Turn, and you find, through the fog, that you face yourself. Look closer, and you see the fog is you; you are nothing; you face nothing; there is nothing. Gasping and bleeding, a shot rings out; your gun, your life, cold and flaccid against your hip.

A woman dies in the throes of passion, her safe word left unspoken or unheard. A senator assassinated. A person explodes. 10,000 people a year die from earthquakes. Markets bull and boar and collapse and stagnate in loose 10 and 20 year cycles. A DUI checkpoint. A bottle of scotch. Organic salad covered in the later runoff of bacteria from a neighboring factory farm. Hospital bills piling up from falling down with no one around to sue. Bounced checks from work; accounting errors that your bank and bills don't understand or care about. Cancer. Heart disease. Stroke. High blood pressure; high BAC's; just being high; to drunk, to sober, to alive, too filled with words to take action. Too many actions taken without words. Too many empty words used to justify actions, too many words used for inaction.
Too many words.
Too many tomorrows.
Listen close enough, and through the fog, you can hear the unsteady march of multitudes...
empty echoes beneath the winter sun.