I was barring myself from sleep, and complication, and I was hiding tentatively behind something in my mind I prayed to God was there, so that when it was time to go to bed, there’d be no monster’s a-popping hungry for my soul in the night. What of sacrilege and disappointment? What of war and passion, burning, dying, 100,000 or more in some graveyard in Iraq, surrounded by mounds of dirt and people crying and speaking Indian tongues in lament. I was drinking my liver to shit on the floor beside the window, where the cats meowed and the birds had a lot of cranky complaints to make. I was masturbating my hand wet and making little noises as I dripped onto the sheets and kept the door locked. I was hunched about the house in sorrow wanting more and eating less and cursing loud and speaking low and walking fast, but sometimes slow and then the rain fell. And the trees swayed. And something made sense to me. I was alone, I loved some dirty old man w/an Irish accent and a dirty mouth. He lay beside me on the bed, old and sorry. I looked at him—really looked at him. He had a great, big, whore-fucking body and a hooked nose rubbed red from his cold. His body took in and let out air like a stupid balloon, the dirty fuck, baring his angry teeth in bed and palming his cock. He was dreaming about the whores his body was born to penetrate. But I wasn’t a whore, was I? No, life never gave me much aside from pain. Masochist then, perhaps. There are people you can simply co-exist with being nothing forever and neither aware, nor minding if you were, this fact, you lose life. But not with this man. With him, you had to be something. Never normal, whatever that means. Never clear, whatever that means. Never right, whatever that means. But always something. Even if only a hoary old masochist who likes to fuck whores.