Stitches in the snow ripped out of bleeding wounds seven years old and two in the making. You’re making me sick from the red on the white because tonight Saint Nicholas will choke on the fumes of your accumulated greed, and the homeless will roast his corpse and roll lots for his clothes.
They are nothing but savage beasts ripping over a scrap of meat, while in the sky faces laugh, a dramatic entrance walking down a tongue like a syrupy staircase.
He saw the city like a massive corpse, and his apartment was a front row seat to the procession of rot and decay. The gangs that marched past his building each night were like a grotesque parade of maggots gorged on Starbucks cups and lottery tickets, used condoms and last month’s paycheck in the form of Jim beam spilled in a sticky pool on hotel room carpet and needles stolen from the dumpster behind the hospital, to be filled with white agony and prick their arms for a chemical escape form the vines that sprout from their soggy mattress and tie them to their lives.
He watched the fire escapes rust and fall out of the brick walls like a snake shedding its skin. And he watched as the dust of the iron rust fell to the street like bloody rain, and the super did not come to pick it up. So when he lit a match, he felt the weight of a hundred lives on his fingertips, and knew he was just a roll of toilet paper and a locked door away from genocide, and the rope thrown out his window was woven from salvation and damnation all at once. To burn in the fire of his last sin, or run from it for as long as he could? When he snuffed the match in the sink, he felt the housing complex cough back to life, and his ceiling shook from the couple that lived above him.
Gunshots sang him to sleep, like a staccato under beat that is fleshed out by the pounding bass throbbing from the cab of a grand Torino parked on the corner of the alley, crammed with Mexicans and bristling with automatic weapons. The creak of the building around him was sometimes almost soothing, but most nights a not so secret part of him just wished it would just collapse and bury this corner of the city in ten feet of rubble and the detritus of a dozen shattered lives. The firemen and emergency response workers won’t know it, but the people they’re saving are already dead, and they want to die again. They’ll find no mementos of childhood in the wreckage.
There are no framed family portraits, and if they are, there’s always at least one face torn out, or with fake penises and breasts scribbled on.  They may reach down and wrap charred fingers around it, but deep down in their sweet, stupid, innocent hearts, they know they don’t need to give this back.
But that’s just a fantasy, and the building does not collapse. The heartbeat of the city just kept beating outside his window. Around eleven, just like clockwork, the hooker’s shrill voices added their texture to the urban chorus.
When morning came and he looked out the window once again, the world was seamless and white, and before the men in their trucks came, he could pretend the city was beautiful. It was appropriate, he thought, that the first thing to break the silence was not a diesel engine, but the crunch of a little girls feet. But the same snow she danced in was the snow some man collected because he couldn’t pay his water bill.
Sometimes when the cracks in the brick get to big the cracks in his brain squeak in sympathy, and two blocks over there are shining lights that hold that the dark and the cold at bay, and loud music and louder company hold the winter air in a shivering ceiling of alcohol fumes. The air is filled with the smells of a thousand foods and faces that smear into abstract shapes outlines by the vicious razor neon glow. By the end of the night, the young people stumble home with full bellies and empty wallets, and sleep, and wake up to their Snapchat inbox and a complete stranger they almost remember.
But forget him now, and look at me.
Its voting month and f*** their business suits that cost more than my car, because they tell you exactly what you want to hear, but their ears are stapled to the tongues of the people whose hands clench dollar bills in sweaty fists like a fragile soggy life jacket for their rotted souls, because they’re not stupid, they know when they talk to him it guides his steps in the path paved with the most green, cause that’s where the vote is at. Our politicians are bait, because by the time they make it to office they’ve got so many hooks in them they’re begging behind cold dead eyes the color of stale coffee to be swallowed like Jonah with two affairs and an embezzlement scheme under his belt.
Like they know you with your veins swimming with chemicals you can’t pronounce, and your eyes dilated till the world is so bright that if you use your imagination, you can almost believe you’re in heaven if it weren’t for the smell. Like they know you when you dream at night about ending your life, or dreaming not so much at night when you’ve got a knife in your right hand and a fist in your left to make the veins bulge like worms under your skin. Like they have any idea when you go to sleep at night that you’ll wake up the next morning and not want to get up because, really, what’s the point?
Rejects! Brain in a concrete box. Thread that’s lost its spool. Christmas tree? I had a crayon drawing taped to the wall, motherf***er. Presents? F*** you. I don’t know what you had when you turned eight but I got half a cigarette and a box of matches wrapped up in dirty newspaper, and that was generous. I could see my father’s ribs when he took off his flannel shirt, because he didn’t eat for a week straight so he could put food on the table for Christmas day, and he was on the streets begging when he wasn’t working, until by December nineteenth he has a whole twenty dollars in change in his back pocket, until he was jumped on the corner of grand and 23rd, and suddenly he had nothing in his back pocket, and a stitch for every dollar in his side where those starved ribs had kept a knife from making the brief acquaintance of his spleen. Then he crawled out the window of the emergency room because he knew the bill was more than his life was worth. Instead of dollar store dinosaurs that year, we had blood on the floor repairing the stitches he ripped, and I went to bed on Christmas eve listening to him wheeze through the holes in the walls, bony shoulders heaving, with his head in his hands weeping. That night my eyes were stitched open.
Surprise! Your idols are defiled, I tell you the truth, they can be ripped apart just like you.
I swear something is going to push me to the brink, and I have never found that I’m stronger than I think. I’ve seen what you call God, and he’s just words on a page, I wonder how long it will be until all you middle class cows realize you’re just a paycheck away from being just like me, because I assure, you, ignorance is most certainly bliss. The unspeakable is just what you’re too scared to say, and it comes from the dying lungs with a rhythm that matches your every mistake.