The city below was shrouded in the distance to here. Faraway sirens and three a.m. trains groaned for attention amid the pitch dark of my thoughts. Tipsy pedestrians doddered home in an undertone of drunk emotion, which, caught in the updraft, winded together and danced loose with leaves and light refuse until it finally reached me in a solitary whimper, a medley of how the world felt, and we bonded.

I lay flat against the roof, staring at the big, black nothing above me: a sky poisoned by the steady drip of street lights and neon signs. The surviving specks weren’t stars at all, but suggestions of a reality rendered unreachable for the blind-sided citizens of tomorrow. I made company from bottle and cigarette; the cig bonded to my chapped lips by the charity of spittle and good whiskey. I shivered at the truth of my condition and longed for any of the more temperate months of my life, that she would knead herself into my side and thaw me from this cold Fall.

I took a final drag. The toxic filled my throat and lungs with a coffin taste. I stifled the burning cig in the ground next to me.  A faint singe of tar itched at my nostrils. I descended like a nadir-oriented dervish into the lowest spirals of discontent: not whirling myself but allowing the world through liquor to whirl about my stock-still body; not redeemed from but numbed to sensory distractions, which themselves were not heavenly nor beautiful, but muddled in the true stink of the universe.