Lonely Place.

What am I doing with my life? The scream shot out of my flesh through empty locker rooms and bath houses, musty hotels, and spectral corridors of west Texas sanitariums, the muttering, hawking, grey dishwater smell of men's shelters, great, dusty warehouses full of old army cots - through broken porticoes and smeared arabesques, iron urinals worn paper thin by the piss of a million faggots, deserted weed grown shacks a musty smell of shit turning back to the soil - the way is broken...

I walk through the Plaza - Ivan sits on the steps - face burned like metal in the flashbulb of urgency. His eye's went out. A whiff of ozone drifted in the clear night riding on the banda music. The novia muttered over her candles and alters in one corner. A dingy white cat pulls at my pant leg and runs onto a concrete balcony. Clouds drift by.

"I could save my checks. Start a little business some place." I nod and smile like a mechanical toy.

"Ivan!!" Rentboys look up from card games, coffee houses, and sullen hooked stances under metal lightposts as the name whistles by and slowly fades away. "Ivan!! Saul!! Diego!! Enrique!!" The plaintive Rentboy cries drift in on the warm night.

"Need you to do me a favor," I croaked, wiping away the more obvious signs of distaste with a sloppy, casual napkin, seeing the grey ooze of junk in Ivan's face, "Don't ever invite me to do that again."

His body moved in little galvanized jerks as the junk channels lit up. "One hit never put anyone back on."

"I know what I am doing." Breathing the residue of methamphetamine out of my already scarred lungs.

I walk alone down Avenida Revolucion to my room amid the carnival of blaring neon and pounding discos everyone looks like a drug addict.

Stopping to sit on a metal bench in front of El Torito disco - wanna sit alone and smoke and think. Depression rising again. Moments pass and handsome cholo pelon sits with me - smell of dirty linens and unwashed bodies - we don't talk but he cackles and grins into his styrofoam coffee cup - he laughed, black insect laughter as patrol after patrol roamed by eyeing us.

This is too tiresome, and I drift home lost without purpose or meaning.

So I lay in my bed, naked, on top of the covers smoking a Faro cigarette watching a black cockroach scale the faded baby blue wall of my room - national sponsored program in Spanish mumbles from the radio - and I think I need to change.

But do I want to?