I am with you in Rikers and I’ve been dead since ‘95 or ‘96 with drugs, with dreams, and waking nightmares sharing my footfalls. No place to go no place to sleep but endless stone and coarse oil pushing through the pores of concrete. The town alley bums, the Wall Street blazers, shiny slick girls crashed their minds into jail, splatter brains on the wall like Pollock. Invisible suburbs wake up electrified.

They give vaccinations against sanity and you can hear terror through the walls and you can feel it in engraved phrases on a bathroom stall. You feel like you’re going through the gutter, rewriting Plath, soaking in cyanide, swallowing shards of stained glass. I fall in love with you when you’re weak and whimpered, reaching out in desperation and understanding me, bared and broken, played like cello strings. We are weeping for the romance of the streets, unspoken love songs between mattresses of concrete and maybe centuries from now they will weep for it too.

Human seraphim, atheist archangels, and Adam’s unwanted brood are shrieking in the piping now and the world is pressing you like Salem stones. Then the last remnants of consciousness and a final few incantations in a greater or less reality that was never right for us.

I’m with you in Rikers as they euthanize you like a vicious mutt. I am with you and the world is holy. Wholly ours.