In the depraved hotel Colorado I sit on the bed and listen to my friends make love in the other rooms. I am not left out, I masturbated into the toilet this morning.

They say where are you going, out to for a smoke. They follow me.

They walk the streets of the living in my pursuit, they inquire: what am I? I run.

I run through the gates to the world of the dead. My friends standing at the gate in the world of the living, badger me why.

The melting faces of the walking dead. The essence of the place something like that painting called Scream.

I give my cigarette to a dead salesman. He takes a drag and gives it back to me. His slimy dead essence on the butt of my cigarette. I place it in my mouth. I ask him if he is a nightmare. No nightmare. No nightmare? No, no nightmare here. The ground beneath my feet began to open up.

The stench of my corpse steeped in coffee, marinating in coffee. When I die the spirits I've imbibed and the chemicals I've inhaled boar out of me. All of it. Souls of women emanating from my grave, like a great bent ghostly smoke stack. They declare themselves in the night sky, we the screaming souls who gave this man a piece of ourselves to be buried with, who wont let him keep it. When I die the pulp of my existence will flood the town streets. The width of the assailment like the girth of my indulgences. The duration, that of my long, long life. In returning what I've taken from the Earth in life, I will take twice that amount in death. Because you won't let me have it all.

The wind blew a visible gust. It will
Dry the semen shortly, the old man
Thought. “Zelda Zelda Zelda,”
He said still standing over her grave.

Even in her old age, she wouldn’t
Be offended by the act, nor repulsed
Any more than a mother by the greedy
Love of her mischievous-spirited son.

“The heavens, with their airy clouds
That hardly even exist, but belie the true
Austere gates designed against me,-
Did I even ever stand a chance?” he said,

And sighed the same familiar way
He does after every one of his early
Morning graveyard rituals, and walked off,
Checking his shoes for stray drops.

Zelda’s tombstone-portrait smiled at his back
From underneath a tiny smudge- the
Uninformed might say despite it, but
They both know she smiled from underneath it.

She takes little risks. When you think she's out marching the carnal-minded places, she is really sitting in bed with a book. Her legs crossed indian style, her hair hanging down to the page like sagging summer weeds, she looked up suddenly because an idea came to her. She dragged her finger along her lip. Her endeavor to make the change like a drop of water hesitating to fall from a clenched fist. She takes little risks.