When a man is desolate, his soul is as bare

As bare as the parched ground of the African Sub-Sahara

Or is he is rent as the Whore of Babylon we’ve not yet seen?

Could it be he’s distraught like a tsunami about to impact?

Or is it his impending doom, the way one feels when a nuclear strike looms over your head?

Is it like the Crossroads of life, where every decision has its consequence?

When a man is so deserted, naked and desolate, it’s like the world becomes the HIV eating away at his defenses, leaving him exposed like the poorest of the poor and simultaneously stripping him of his masculinity, as if he were a eunuch anew

Say it is worse, but a cancer, or a hunger that gnaws away at his flesh and his soul

Or even deeper still, is his desolation a result of his isolation from the rest of the world

That the mark of his pain, his misery is seen in his right hand, the evidence of his faith by which is clearly seen and known?

They say when a Man is desperate and desolate, his mind shuts down, his heart, desiccate but his spirit laid bare like a fresh corpse for the tomb

He knows only survival, yet he’s doomed to fail like this anyway

By which he breathes and lives, like the moments he spends with his Whores, his playthings, so to is he to be played

Like a harp from Hell; Where is this mark of desolation, you ask me?

They say a man wears it upon his neck like the mark of a Vampire

On upon his heart like its heavy with a burden

Maybe upon his back; did he relieve Atlas of his burden?

Despicable it seems; mayhap the truth of his loss, his unyielding despair likens itself to a blade plunged into his gullet

To rip free his entrails

Or is it the details of his scenario?

Does he hope the water from the Side of Christ free him from his momentary Inferno

Or is it his lost to the Circle of Violence

Ah but now he awakes

A shade in a grove of Suicides

Because its not lawful for him to possess what he’s robbed himself

So it would seem,

Like the dried river bed he walks on

Leading nowhere but eternal ruin