• The alarm blares in my senses like rush hour traffic.
    My eyes still sore,
    my throat still red,
    my body still scarred and battered.
    My heart pounds at the thought of my days past,
    thoughts of the day ahead,
    of twisted triumph.
    I wake up.

    I get up and turn off the machine that I use
    to drag me from my blissful forgetting,
    my rapturing ignorance;
    and then I look into the mirror.

    My eyes are rimed red and blood shot,
    my face a swallow grey and sunken.
    It is hardly a face,
    and more or less indistinguishable
    from the face that used to me mine.
    I grab my sunglasses and place them over my eyes,
    my hair,
    a dirty patch perched atop my skeleton head,
    hangs limp in my face.
    I hunger now.

    I walk outside.
    The sunlight burns my skin,
    my face turns from the sun,
    I long to curl up and die.
    My eyesight clears
    and the jarring angles of the city come into view.

    Tall buildings rotting and stinking with decay,
    and graffiti,
    a plague,
    covers their sides,
    as well as the scarce vegetation.
    There are no trees,
    no life.
    Unless you count the almost lifeless homosapiens,
    almost lifeless.

    This mutant plague
    consumes everything in it's path,
    a picture of violence felt
    on the very bones of the city.
    Every window is futilely barred to it.
    Every road has hole in it,
    which causes you to drop suddenly
    with your mouth shooting off
    like whips and flame,
    arms flailing to keep you up.
    But the worst part is not the plague,
    nor the lifelessness.
    But rather the end of the beginning,
    the catalysis of the plague,
    the takers of prize.

    Prize is the god of hallucinations,
    and eventually...
    death.
    This being shows you who you really are,
    the taker and giver of life.
    They walk up and down the road
    peddling their prizes,
    selling death.

    I sit on the corner bus stop.
    I watch a girl being taken by a man,
    open,
    her chest bare,
    her eyes wide and pleading to me.
    there is no hope for her.
    She is lost.

    With in minutes she is gone,
    her arm draped over the dumpster's edge,
    the maggots and flies
    gorging themselves on her warm flesh;
    she had gone to meet the end of all.

    The man shakes.
    the prize from her he takes for himself.
    His convulsions cease,
    and he spits on her corpse.
    A whore she is called.
    Oh, well...

    I get up and walk the path
    I had taken so many times before,
    to my prize.

    the building I enter is infected,
    the plague feeds on it as the flies,
    the structure as old and decaying as the
    dumpster girl.
    A fitting end for the prize.
    It is only
    one
    girl

    The inside is rank
    with the stench of rot,
    and putrescence,
    my life,
    my home.
    I take a look from a window
    across the river to the other side.
    Where prize is a myth,
    told by the other children
    to scare themselves.

    The man waits for me
    in the room;
    he hands me my prize.
    I laugh at him as he reaches for his
    new girl.
    Her eyes are heavily lidded,
    to hide the red.
    Red means passion,
    lust,
    love,
    and death.
    In other words...
    PRIZE

    As I leave the room
    she smiles.
    As I leave the building
    she screams.
    It has claimed another victim
    who couldn't pay.

    I take the prize for myself.
    I calm.
    My head feels detached,
    and then I feel;
    no worries,
    no fear,
    no ugliness,
    no happiness.
    I feel alone.
    Then my world is how I remember it.
    I am flying.
    The plague is gone,
    the lights evaporate
    into Technicolor bubbles.
    the children read about
    the end of the world
    in their newspapers
    as the people of the prize
    float overhead.
    The dumpster girl shakes her head at me.
    I am ashamed now.
    I walk out of the dream world
    into reality.
    I feel the need to end.
    I want to end.

    I walk down the road.
    My head is airy.
    My legs are lead.
    My skin is on fire.
    I climb to the bridge that links
    the other side and the city,
    the bridge between love and lust.
    People shout and jeer below my perch,
    I am atop the bridge now.
    My end awaits in the
    murky water below me.
    I lean over.

    I fall.
    I feel whole again.
    My hair whips around my face,
    the people scream,
    the wind roars in my ears,
    my laugh is full of life.
    And then...

    I fly.