The room is getting small, but I don’t care.  My eyes are wider, I think to myself as the walls move ever closer.  The bottle seems empty although the screw top is securely fastened and the liquor is level with the neck.  I’m nervous.

Soon this has got to be over but it’s only been six days.  Six days of being told no by people who don’t know.  Six days of toilet paper and invisible demons, zombies walking the streets afraid of the very brains they eat.  Six days of Mitch and the boys blurting out shit-stained sentences about nothing that no one cares about.

It doesn’t help that I don’t care.  It doesn’t help that my mind is a blur with thoughts of the apocalypse.  The end of the world is a welcome change from this tedium.  I’ll need to remember my machete, just in case.

I’ll go for a bike ride.  It’s safe in my helmet.

Beer is running low, but there’s three pounds of coffee in the freezer.  I’ll have to make run.  I’ll dig a grave for my sanity on the way out.  Oh, never mind, there isn’t time.

No matter the guise; no matter the government; no matter the cause: I am there.  I am there with my smile and my promises; and you listen as I talk.  I talk and continue to speak as the blood runs from your ears and tears role from your eyes.  I will speak.

The words will float at first, and then as the heaviness begins to sink in they will turn to stones.  They will burn your skin, but you will cease to not believe.  They will burrow like a tick; they will crawl with unrelenting fervor and as they eat away at all hope: I will speak.

My eyes look at nothing; my mind thinks no thoughts;  I am empty and that is my strength: the void that was my humanity was given away long ago.  My suit is clean and my hands are dirty.  My shoes are polished as I step over the remnants of my integrity and all of our possibilities.

My law is my master; my words are my weapons. I have a heart of gold.

There is danger in every crevice, in every corner, and I feel it in my bones.  Security is my goal, the ever-allusive safety that I am promised by those that would keep me safe.  I will pay the cost, not because I must, but because the darkness of ignorance suits me.

I need a weapon; I need a camera;  I need to know that the weapons of evil or quelled by the lights of heaven.  I need to know that all is well as I sit in my room alone with my fears.  Change must be ceased; progress must be stifled; smiles must be turned.

As age creeps up, as all things do, with a menace in its eyes and evil in its heart, my right is safety and my liberty is an illusion.  Death, the ultimate enemy, must not win and just as security against the devils of the world must be strengthened so must the security against the abyss that I imagine.

I will pay the price, and will force you to do the same.