I took a tab of acid before I left to hit the bar right at five. Up and down my alley by five is when the screaming starts. Men and women mainly women. Most were pissed off about something or other. You are accountable to the Homo sapiens who love you. Maybe they need you and they love you. Many, just leave the loft, walking to the bar by 5:15. A toast. You made it out alive. It’s harder than it looks. In twenty minutes, she’d have sent the kids in to retrieve him from his bliss. Before the kids arrived, I gave him a tab, too.

You have to come home, now.

Who said.

You have to come home now.

Go be nice.

Off he goes. The tab hits about right now. Kids memorized the walk.

He didn’t drink all of his whiskey.

The thick cement tube air was not quite air. You could breathe it. But too much, and your face fell off. A cosmic wind of solid neutrino pouring deluge through the subway tracks where looming eggs tower above the above, whatever it is, it is.

Just a bar where starring out the window is my work, it’s where I do my starring out the window at the students who are struggling to find cover in the rain, a sideways sidewalk glance at the people in the bar, yes, shadows flash of less than half a volt, that is the one, and no one had spies because their pupils had been burned out of their stubs. The subway ate the students, and that was what death looked like. A trailing away of a cement-gray lights like an old cold witches’ wind. Get on the train. Get on the train. A runway train headed for the dancing in Damascus.

Get on the train with two gold coins for the boatman who always walked the full length of the train, a good twelve miles. This guy never sits down. How much do we ever keep paying enough is enough. Of rumbling. Of we will never get there. Fuck, do I have to know these people. Of the sewers of the rot. And the wet gray mop. There is no such thing as enough, and the boatman knows it. The boatman knows who dies. We are staring at the boatman, and we have no eyes.