The little boy sits on the street corner.  So patient, such wide eyes innocently accusing the world of being beautiful.  Falsely.  Or maybe that very urgent belief verifies itself.  Maybe the crumpled child waiting fruitlessly in the gutter is more then a scar on the marred face of the ruthless ages, more then a symbol of Sin's united filth.  Maybe it is a challenge to that filth.

The girl cries from her third story apartment.  Sobbing because she is thirteen, and sobbing because she has a right to do so.  Our useless priveledges are our most useful, because they are with us forever, who would dare deny us a right that does nothing?  And yet it does something.  Maybe in our vain struggle we defy vanity and retain personhood.  The bruises on her arms are not fair, the blood is not right.  The sun still shines, and somewhere someone says "Today is glorious!"  and believes their own presumption.  Are they liars, or thieves of another man's right to die in a world devoid of laughter, or are they gods and kings, building small cities, setting up little lamps, defying the undefiable and creating reality from the pretend?

The man is twenty two and he is running.  He does not cry, because tears suggest a limit, no matter how great, to pain, and his has none.  His empty eyes plead for the pain to rip his chest apart, but in vast cruelty, his body refuses to let him down.  His running means nothing, it has no goal but to obtain the fullness of emptiness.  But despite himself, he gets somewhere, and in that somewhere the sun is shining.  He discovers that what he lost is not unretrievable, and he breathes.  Some say he is a fool, but maybe he has discovered the only thing a man can do. 

Maybe.  Or maybe not