The lack of everything, the lack of common sense, the lack of cold, clean, textbook logic, the lack of purpose, the lack of nurture, the lack of touch, all of this sculpted me. With wet clay, they molded and squeezed and shaped with their claws until I lived with breath and blood. They forged me in the furnace of apathy and vulpine rage. I walk wall to wall to wall to wall here and talk to no one. I was never made, I was never named, my studio apartment has no letter or number, my building has no address.

I boarded up the only window, but daylight often leaks through: Thin stems of sun slice into cordons the black of my room to remind me that the herds, the flocks, the throngs, that YOU, that all of you, hate me. Out there the bobbing heads coalesce: Sun-studded dew trickles into streams, streams funnel into rivers, rivers flow into oceans. And the oceans, they heave. In here, I’m cramped.

Confined to this small oblong space, I know this: It’s grown to be an extension of myself, a fifth appendage, an extended limb of filth. The cracked mirror reflects back a face rearranged by Picasso, a fractioned face, all triangles and silver knives and puzzle pieces and decimals. I feel beneath my feet the chilly floorboards, a statue’s cold cement hands (I should reference some famous sculptor here. Ha). The water bugs scale the kitchenette counters and sink and with their pincers pinch clean the caked brown egg on the iron skillets and the dried macaroni cheese chunked on the bowls and the bits of white rice stuck to the Tupperware and the tomato juice lip imprints on the glasses. The broken television—for years inert and blank, like the painting of a lobotomy—serves as a symbol of my imploded psyche; the cranial sprockets dial to no end and the rusted gadgetry grinds in on itself.

And then there’s the wooly darkness of my room, that sweater of heartless black: It pervades like a mass, like it is matter and it is touchable, and it gladly shows me the stunted graph of my timeline: the black letter days, the limp pendulums, the dark seas I evolved from, the smiling moms and dads scissored out of family photographs, the dead air whistling through the infant’s fingers.

I hope you feel this all the way to the bone. I hope you pull yourselves back down into yourselves and rip off the visors and realize that the dice are loaded, that the rules favor one set of opponents, that this game was won long before any of us were born. I hope you see your own madness not just as a shadow, as a chalkboard equation, but as a blood-swollen entity, something meaty. I hope the cold cracks you wide.

Calendars from now: The angels’ breath breezes through their trumpets, the clouds sink to the city streets, and He delivers justice and good with sword. Snakeskin sermons dispatch all unbelievers with curt violence, all wrongs are made right. You can’t hide; your consciences flag you and surrender you up. Night hugs the life out of the kids, the losers win, applause roars…

“Until then, this.”