Jungle of Sleep

All of my life has been spent adding and subtracting the insignificant events that have engulfed my sense of nothingness. There’s an invisible abacus floating above me like a halo that only I can see. A tilted crown fit for a deranged and deluded king.

The king of nothingness.

The tilted crown of sickness.

Strangers often mistakenly visit me whenever the bars close and the diners light up. They make themselves sick with booze and wander towards whatever streetlight corner I’m mumbling beneath. As a child, the local kids would poke fun at me for not smoking cigarettes or joining them as they throw rocks at helpless birds. Now, decades later, the locals poke the heels of their boots at me as they rejoice the belittling of humiliating this master of none. Their animalistic kicking and stomping passes their sickness onto me as my crown tips farther downwards.

Tonight must be the night.

What is a king without his crown? If only it jingled like silver bells when it falls to the ground; the onlookers would mistakenly deem me nothing but a jester and clap at my demise.

Oh, if only it shined as the streetlight above me does. Illuminating the darkest corners of myself as I stumble and mumble my way through this decaying jungle of asphalt and asphyxiation.

Sick, sick, six more kicks and I’m gone. I vanish into the pavement like some ghost of sickness past and leave the abacus behind to inspire whatever empty eyes can perceive it. They’ll wear my crown too until it tilts itself towards nothingness again and the victim of this nothingness paces around mumbling soliloquies under streetlights at four o’clock in the morning until they’re murdered out of disgusted pity.