Tonight, or no other.

"You don't love me," she whispered, brushing off the arm encircling her waist with no more reluctance than she would a fly, leaning back to let the coarse grain of his neck rub against her cheek.
"No? Unlike, no doubt, all those others you left panting in dark rooms, too afraid of what it would mean to force you to stay?"
She grasped the hand following the lines of her neck, a hand wrought from the stuff of iron and pain. The tendons were taut lines and the fingers hair-triggers in uneasy tension, ready to fire should she allow him to relax his grip. His breathing was steady.
"Is it that I don't love you, or that you don't despise me enough to let me? I don't love you--but there's no way for you to know that."
"Except that you just told me."
"All you know of me is that I'm a fantastic liar. Why believe me now?"
"I never said I did." With her free hand she pushed him away and pulled herself around so that her back was against the door. They stood feet apart, her one hand still wrapped around the back of his wrist, their ankles painted pale yellow in the triangle of light intruding from the hall. Her other hand gripped the handle but did not turn it.

Minutes passed and they stared through each other in perfect silence. He grinned with the grim satisfaction of a magician who has sold his secrets for a chance to escape his illusions, never once letting the tension out of the space between them. The distance drew the lines out of her face, the weariness from her eyes, and the moisture from her tongue. She did not once break his gaze.

"Have I won yet?"
She fell forward, placing her lips to his ear. The words fell from her mouth in a surrendered half-whisper.
"You can have me."
He pulled his hand from hers and in one motion pulled her coat from the rack and draped it around her shoulders. She felt bitter air flow from behind. He had turned the knob for her. Light from the hall poured in through the creaking door, revealing the shabby carpet cushioning their distant shoes.
"Then I already have."
She pulled away and backed out slowly. His grin was gone, but his gaze, piercing, cold, and powerful, remained.
She turned and left without a word, descending the steps of the apartment without a single thought on her mind. The cabbie waiting below kindly asked in a voice of simplicity, "Back home, ma'am?"
She gave her usual response without thinking. "I haven't got one."
For the first time, though, she meant it.

Anywhere Peachtree

Watch you the ever-rushing stream, feet that sweep and drag across the uneven concrete of indeterminate sidewalks. The feet of workers and lovers, of the whores and the homeless as they chafe the beaten path swallowed so insidiously by glorified shadows of towers. Metal spires and rancid bird-forms compete for control of the skies, and the weary seldom look up to see what man hath wrought--seldom look, and never see.

These downturned eyes watch the very feet that trod confident in selfsame misery toward long predestined locations--uptown, downtown, hometown--claim which place you may, swear upon your land, place bets upon the great re-bar altar and wait for some god's will to mortar the gaps in the philosophy of contradiction. Idiosyncratic and certain creep these gears toward mass amalgamation; the altar grows a mind of its own, and faith so eloquently sworn in light cares naught about the shadows it casts upon the city. Such genuine catastrophe the world has never known--Fat is the lamb for sacrifice, though beneath mounds of wool his form is gaunt and degenerate.

The prostitute is round with child and heavy in labor. She walks through the night and cries for a room, shelter, but most simply, innocently, for warmth. Rain begins to fall. Thunder roars, shakes the city at its foundations; lightning tears through the sky and welds with the woman's birth cries. The child is born wet and bloody upon unforgiving asphalt.

The lowly son of David walks the streets in perpetually assured melancholy. He finds the woman with newborn child and holds her close.
"I have ever been thy friend, sister."
"I am a whore but no fool. I have known your people and they bear no likeness to you."
There she dies, wrapped in the torn white cloths of a bearded savior. He kneels and cradles the newborn with tears streaming quietly down his cheeks, carried with the rain down darkened chasms filled with rotting flesh and buried plastics. Not a soul glances downward--eyes ever directed toward their own feet take no notice of the contrast sitting forgotten in the street, and only the sewers will taste his tears, those last rivulets of innocence and hope drawn away though man's own devices.

The newborn awakens, eyes directed upward at his first clear sight, the glass and steel arched so imposingly over his head.
His tears join the Jew's, and he screams purple-faced for the world that has caged him in and forgotten them both.

The least of these

No, she said. I have no mind left to give.
No?, I say. I have no heart left to live.
With a smile and a grimace and the torture all in one
I swear to thee the truth to be and never am undone.
A whimper and a whisper and the tears begin to fall
All is everything that never was--and that is all.
A dream of life for fear of death and nightmares in between
A tearing silent murmur for the ever present stream
Of migraine sights and blinding lights
And heat to fill the broken rites
Fire sweet, unbroken ground,
Stolen hearts and written thoughts--
A bland and vapid sound.

Furor fervor love and lust
The least of these is man--
He loses all to every one and ends where he began.