Liturgy for the Lost

Tears for friends gone and friends going: for all those already swallowed up and wasted away, destroying themselves in the absence of any other plan of action, all wrapped up in the brutal apoptosis of small town America. All of us who had wandered too far or not far enough, abandoning something essential, being left defenseless in the midst of that tremendous capacity for self-destruction.

He didn’t understand the fuck-all luck of it all, why he had been allowed to escape with just a few others. All the rest finding near infinite ways to grind themselves down, day after day, whittling away the small hopes and just being left in a immense padded room with no edges and no walls and no doors, nothing to push yourself off of.

He pulled his hair; defenseless against the utter immensity of the life he had tried to leave behind -- angry that he couldn’t help but hang, like ballasts of iron, the past about his body.

That night he dreamt he was lost in the salt-flats, shit-faced drunk and naked, humming through a broken whistle. Star-drunk and wild-eyed in the desert cyclorama.