"My dead friends and I"

                                  My dead friends left me rotting in a third-story tenement hallway uptown; where the regional railway coincides with intersecting bus-stop terminals. The weather was brisk and at autumn's peak. Fogged evening window seats on a rush-hour train. I could feel dark ages riding down upon us: eternally. Prior decades of keeping to myself; blowing off steam in greyhound restroom intervals. Truck-stop prostitutes: we dwindle in subdued terror and erroneous mayhem. The plunger left in his pale sinew as he exhaled one final terminal breath.
                                  Dying shadows spread out against concrete apartment building courtyards below. I peered downwards to an urban uproar. Bedbug furniture being thrown from a second-story balcony. A livestock woman seems upset at her domesticated lover for unknown reasons. Better head to the neighborhood delicatessen before two a.m.. Black-and-white living-room television static upheavals. Beer-stains battered upon torn maroon carpeting. Cockroach kitchen-upholstery: leave the fluorescent lights on while we rest upon gun-shop mattresses; soiled in head-lice and cheap make-up furniture bedding.
                                My ex-wife came back from traveling abroad one winter afternoon with a new face. A fresh approach to the city and all it had to offer. She came back to a pensive young adult-male about 5'8 with nocturnal bedhead. I had the eight-ball blues at a stale morning diner one early Saturday. Bloody-Mary waitresses: a counterfeit delight. What happens on the east side stays on the east-side: downtown trafficking violations. Drunken Sunday art museum madness. Picasso was a bastard, Dali: an arrogant son-of a bitch. Pollock was an ungrateful drunk. Basquiat? who the Fuck is basquiat?
                                My dead friends and I stroll down residential walkway landings amid late-October reckoning. Cement sidewalk brick-house vestibules where street-bred pigeons nest and crap. One particular dead friend of mine hasn't shit in three weeks: he blames it on his opiate habit.
                                So anyway: my ex-wife left me lying naked on the torn-up maroon carpeting I was  talking about; juiced-up on dirt-bike tequila listening to Jackson Browne records. Every once in a while my telephone would ring: the 5th Avenue score report: Leroy and Muhammad wanting feedback on this boy 'Measles' I was telling them about the night before.
                                 Once a few years back; my ex-wife and I were still madly in love. Drinking junkyard bourbon with twisty straws out of empty gasoline receptacles. We would watch V.H.S. movies until placid daylight ascended up through the pale horizon; I thought we would live forever in our delusional livelihood; we achieved some morbid sense of camaraderie. She would occasionally ask me why I was drinking first thing in the morning; I would say "because I have to". It was just the way things were at that time. To this day I still can't decide which one I love the most: The flesh and blood or the pale silent ghost. The ageless mystery remains within the confines of my daily cemetery tombstone retrieval..