text: A hundred of his money had been lost to the abyss. Watching the moon lazily trace across the concrete sky, muffled by roaring clouds and bureaucracy, his cigarette let him embrace a cold shiver of indifference. In the distance a mother is exploited and a husband is suffocated by the towering cavalcades of steadfast progress. A distracting blue light stings his eyes and slams his head. Text no longer written but blared with burning intensity into the retina of any poor soul broken enough to find it comforting. Ascending multicoloured boxes rolled by his fingers bartering away his emotions and instincts. Pleasantly disguised chimes made him salivate - he could only applaud Pavlov and the other dogs crammed into his vicinity. Addiction is only a problem when it is unwanted. One of the boxes materialised amongst the blurry fog. A cartoon fish. A price. A location. Rebellion commoditised. Effective communication. Predetermined probabilities forced him to go willingly. If hope can be caught he saw no reason why it wouldn’t dwell in the ocean. A bed submerged by millions of water is less weight than people’s expectations. Were he ever named hope it would make an ideal resting place, far away from disappointment. \* \* \* Rolling rubber. Shaking metal. A smearing of personalities side by side. The bus took him away from himself by adjusting others into focus. Shooting peaks of structure and earth set themselves in the corner of his eyes for the inconvenience, their intrusion sometimes ebbing out a tear. Swapping transportation for transportation. Metal for wood. Concrete for water. Fluorescence for moonlight. The bobbing cradled his bruised self and took him out into the vacuum. Whispers of dormant Gods lashed against his exposed ego, beating his flesh raw. Nothing left for him. Nothing left to do but cast a line. Sitting quietly with an endless background of noise. Fishing about for silver, wiggling, abstract prizes all turning and contorting around each other. A bite, a word, a phrase. He held it in his palm for inspection. It was not a big one, not one you would want to hang on a mantle or show to your father, but good enough for the lazy and disposed carcass that was perched over the pulsating expanse of black liquid. He gripped it like a child grasps a toy, running his fingers over the set plastic ridges, contemplating only the primal sensation the unholy smooth material lent to his nervous system. The phrase played continuously over his inner self, unobserved but present, its existence a comfort rather than a meaningful reflection. Zero percent of hope had been found. Something still ruled the world with a shit eating grin. All he had managed to do was make himself feel sad. He started to suspect systems of people had fucked him over personally. It had, however, made him into a weary boy with something like a university degree in pain. Instead of building hope, he now builds a precise model of a grotesque, duplicitous world.