I am this city. I think I'm dead. I think I hate. My eyes glare with hatred for no reason. Hatred for you. Hatred for everything. Everything I see. I can't help thinking about how, a long time ago, it was time for all this to end. Due time for everything and all to end. To cease to be. To be done with forever. Obviously, painfully, it drags on and on beyond anyone's control. Eternal entropy: the city and everything in it creep closer to disaster and keep creeping closer to disaster yet without ever actually quite reaching it. I hate. Therefore I am. I seethe. Therefore I am. I burn. Therefore I am. The burning just occurs, it takes me over. I serve my own burning. The burning serves no purpose. The burning serves no purpose except to intensify the misery. Except to scratch out these words on paper. Except to make me this city. Except to make you run. You see my eyes. They glare for you. For no reason but for you. Did that last line hit you? I wanted it to. Do these words bludgeon your face until it's an unrecognizable pulp? I want them to. Do you want to meet me on the street? I want you to. Do you want to die? I want you to. I want you to die by my hands. I want to take it out on you. I want to take out the filth the squalor the ugliness the purposelessness the expensiveness the stupidity on you. I want to inflict my pain on some innocent individual in order to obtain my release from it. That innocent individual might as well be you. Release is the sound of your skull cracking. Release is the sight of your limbs breaking. Release is the taste of your heart in my mouth. Release is the absence of your heartbeat. Just my way of showing how much I really do love you, these releases of mine. I've got your love. My love for you is here at the end of my knife. My love for you is here loaded into my gun. My love for you is here in the iron on my knuckles. And I want you to know my love for you. I want my love to hit its mark. I want to give you my love, give it to you now. Oh, to see the bruises of pain break out upon and across your miserable body! Oh, to see those blue/gray flowers of pain sweep across your face your arms your chest. To see you die would in me incur spontaneous orgasms. This is how you should show your love for me: kill yourself, kill yourself for me now. Make me happy for at least once brief instance in this bleak land of fear. The city has swallowed me up. The city has swallowed me whole and I live in its large intestine. I'm sitting in the large intestine of the city. I'm shitting in the large intestine of the city. I am a piece of shit. I am a piece of shit and I'm waiting for the city's large intestine to shit me out. I am instead a cancerous tumor. A cancerous tumor within the large intestine of this city. I am a bowel movement waiting to happen. I am some diarrheic lump of fecal matter soon to be spurt out of the city like yesterday's meat loaf special. Take me. Take me home. I'm yours. I'm your very own souvenir of the city, something you can keep close to your heart forever: a piece of shit. A lump of brown waste. A metaphor for idiots. Eat me now, I'm your dinner. Okay. I wake up. A disappointment. A new day. A new disappointment. Another twenty-four hours of life. Another twenty-four hours of disappointment. I want to get rid of the disappointment. I want to get rid of the days. I want to take the disappointment out on someone. I want to take the disappointment out on your face. I want to take the eyes out of your face. I want to take your face off of your skull. I want to take your skull of your spine. I want to take your spine off of this earth. I want to take the earth, put it into a plastic bag, and bury it somewhere where you, myself, and the little baby jesus or anyone they know will never, ever find it again. But, until that happens, I'll be here, trying to take you down. Trying to take it all down. And, if I catch up with you, you're going down hard. You're going down hard and you're going to stay down. My foot's bound for your face. I want my insole to make a permanent track on your face. I think it's time you checked your watch. And when you do, you'll see ten thousand bright lights calling your name. Ten thousand bright lights representing ten thousand ugly whores bearing ten thousand different diseases, all with your name etched on them. Welcome. Welcome to the city. Our world and welcome to it. Welcome to your funeral. Welcome to your landlady holding a baseball bat in a heated argument with non-English speaking tenants. Welcome to vomit in the bathroom. Welcome to drugs on every corner. Welcome to the violent bull-dykes living next door. Welcome to the hordes who find bathing unnecessary. Welcome to yourself, an alcoholic, and addict. Welcome to a future of poverty and filth. Filth as far as the eye can see. Filth as far as the cataract can see. Open the door and let yourself in. Kick down the door and stab me in the head. Break down the door and rip me off. Try to steal the valuables my poverty will never provide me. Then kill me. Finish the job. Have a nice day, now kill me. Each day, just like the others. Each day, an exercise in futility. Left, right. Left, right. Stretch those nothing-muscles good now, girls: you don't want your dead husbands to be disappointed when they come home from a hard day of robbing, killing, and getting raped on the subway to find that you're just too damned exhausted to stay up with them all night smoking crack and selling babies. Dead men. Dead women. On the subway. In the bars. In the nightclubs. Dead men all. Going to work. Fucking. Catching diseases. Shooting up. Dead men all. Dressing to hide the fact. It doesn't work. The city's a morgue. We're slaves in hell. Stoking the fires of our own damnation. Waiting for nothing. Good for nothing. Killing the time. So it will be as dead as we are. We're dead and just going through the motions, pretending we're not dead. Nothing's going on here. Nothing goes on in this city. Except this long, perpetual wake. Dead men next door. Dead men selling newspapers. Dead men selling pretzels and hotdogs. Dead men playing music. Dead men writing plays. Dead men engaged in cultural activities. Dead men asking directions on the street. Dead performance artists. Dead T..V. stars. Dead radio waves. Take this city, it's dead. I give it to you. Take the corpse that is this city. You may have it. I consider you as having paid in full. Just take it. Leave me extant in some landscapeless void, the one place where I belong. This city is now yours. Suffer its ownership. The rats. The whores. The crack. The smack. The junkies. The queers. The straights. The cons. The assholes, assholes all. And the worse assholes: the assholes trying to pass themselves off as your friends. The people who want something from you, even if you have nothing to give, nothing to give anyone. The deals gone sour. The dreams lying dead. The mindless obedience to the laws of the street. The misfits. The uncared-for. The unkempt. The ill-advised. The slowly dying. The dead soul leagues marching off to another nine-to-five day and a shitty apartment at the end of it. The racists. The minorities. The conservative kill-hungry reactionaries. The conformist left-wing hipsters passing themselves off as creative artists. The friends without talent who chastise you for stooping low enough to work in a commercial medium. The artist friends doomed to a life of poverty and substance abuse. The friends you'll never, ever be able to make. Friends you'll never be able to make because of the tacit rules of the city: shut up keep quiet don't talk to strangers strangers are potential killers people on the streets are your enemies people on the streets are your competitors in the battle being waged over microscopic increments of personal space and oxygen: shut up, keep to yourself, go to your job, then go back home and lock yourself in the pathetic, over-priced apartment. The shitty apartment that's supposed to be your reward for putting up with this city. Perpetuate this cycle until death finally, mercifully, arrives. Death, your only release from all this shit. All the shit of the city. Just try to avoid becoming another senseless victim of a meaningless crime until you die a natural death. Things that pass for "natural deaths" in this city (an incomplete and incomprehensive listing): muggings rapes first degree manslaughter third degree manslaughter senseless subway disputes mistaken identity killings being "of the wrong race" being "of the right race" asking someone what time it is giving someone a friendly piece of advice praying going in to eat at a fast food restaurant and becoming the victim of an insane mass murderer getting laid and dying of AIDS respiratory arrest due to drugs that you scored that, by some freak accident, turned out to actually be the drugs they were sold to you as suicide getting knifed as a result of pleasantly saying "good morning" to a corporate co-worker eating too many street hotdogs and dying of intestinal cancer waking up, breathing the air, then dying as a result falling in love with some prostitute, then getting beaten to death by her jealous pimp watching too much T.V. and lapsing into an irreversible coma death due to job-related stress death due to electrocution once you're convicted for that tri-state killing spree saying "hello" to the wrong person death incurred by a rabid rat bite death due to boredom.