Signals fire. Pain. Pain. Ache. Pain. The head compensates offering solutions, not out of truth but out of desperation. I shuffle in my seat, waiting for the night’s high to take me.

It keeps its distance. A mocking, smirking distance that tells me I’m worse off than I’d hoped.

You think it. Let it consume you. Pretend it’s not control and then when your legs are swept out from underneath you it is the first place you go for comfort.

Tell me I am loved. Tell me in a way I can feel. Tell me that the world is hell but word is king and as long as I have them clenched in my fists I will survive. I will survive. Telling stories. Telling lies dressed in truth, in beautifying flasehood.

I exist in a glasshouse. A roaming cathedral of unwritten promises. Each a token to the man I wish I could be. Each a reminder that I have one more failure to overthrow in some future success. All the while growing weary, more certain that success is more a number than a legitimate state of being.

I fear death. Well, not quite. I feel the unaccomplishment that precedes it. I fear a failure to provide and create. Leaving nothing to be enough now our later. No loaf of bread, no Moby Dick, only a sullen ash regretting that all is silent in the coliseum of the dead.

Still, the head hurts. Stoned or not. It thunders in tantrum. Believing itself better and beyond what it has been given. Wishing to be given a chance to fail, to fly, or scuttle itself in lie.

Instead it loathes. Staring at screens riddled in distraction, it pontificates and dreams of being able to blame others for the chance, merit, and timing.

It is a lonely, booze soaked night. I offer you a seat at the table beside me. Skal