While the Women Were Sleeping.

                                               I've been waking up a lot lately in ruptured public thresholds, where vulturous county police run circles around my throbbing head, embedded in the stale soil. Daily living has become a homeless drunken mockery, a chore of sordid living. In the master's chambers, upon the township ravine, we pour endless bourbon into stained glass containers. Enveloped in these rural walls, domesticated in the well furnished moonlight. It is the women in my life that have held me together. Afternoon slumbers, we perspire restlessly in tranquil Sunday heat, the urban comforter, the lazy recliner. Sunlight perishes upon desolate walkways, left vacant. Unwinding melancholy thoughts dwindle drearily along community outlet stores.
                                             Sisters of desperation, Theresa of the blood, Margaret of living ends. Say a few words girls. Speak to the dismal audience. Perhaps explain the folly of vulnerable men like me. The boundaries between decrepit alleyways and formidable perimeters. I've grown weary at best beside sparkling city fountains. Daylight water shimmers in primitive eloquence, the pedestrian magnitudes grow way out of hand here darling. These women have spoken to me in darkened jailhouse corridors, came visiting me upon bourgeois Summer hospital beds. Tidy white sheets, the translucent mirror on the pillared wall in front of an empty room.
                                            Today I found myself alone on a park bench, aside the winding river. It was then that a feminine voice resounded vibrancy in the depth of my fatigued consciousness. Mother is yet to fail my childlike premonitions, springtime lessons, steady teachings of vocabulary and arithmetic. It was Miss Nancy that came to me in the first grade. The hearth of her loins amidst her pale milky thighs stained unforgettable impressions into my adolescent realm. Decades later, it is I who pays societies debts. A criminal, a vagabond, an impoverished migrant. I've roamed these dried out farmlands looking for work, a way to support my starving family. We were young and foolish then, we were not thinking about times like these. We never planned anything, we sought pleasure much before wisdom.
                                            It was in the sultry disgusting hour of morning, just before the scattered dawn. I crept out the kitchen screen door while the women were asleep. I felt my soul heavily falling beneath my foreboding footsteps. I saw my breathing moments flicker greatly beyond the remote silhouetted mountains. When I came to the center of the same barley field I would frequent as a child with my sisters. I pulled a cold moist .48 from my faded trousers, gently caressed it's metallic weight against my frail temple, the sun commenced to peek through the skies eastern chamber, gently squeezing the trigger, while the women were sleeping.