All is silent. A silence as certain and distant as peace.

there is a friend in my home who is not friend. This should be my old compa Jorge who would often visit, stay the night, rap and make art with me on the sides of buildings and over passes and banks.

Not ever on anything independently owned, nothing without a purpose or a genuine question and nothing without art. Jorge laughs like fireworks look and there’s always fun around the corner of his smirk.

A friend is here, but it is not my friend.

He is disguised in a disgusting mask of flesh, swollen and puffy and it doesn’t fit his real face. A darkness peering from black eyes and I’m trying to keep it cool, casually taking in information of this rotten, bloated presence over my shoulder.

I cannot face him. When I look back I am terrified by what I feel and my words fall like molasses. I slowly return to the task at hand. He doesn’t move a fraction, a vision of malice, fossilized in amber.

I’m washing the dishes…eyes in my back like thorns, the most intense leer like the soft tap of spider’s legs that want in.

This day is weeks and months and these years just a sunny afternoon outside. I come and go, I’m busy and I’m only stopping in to leave. This unfriend living in my home, with my family, my mother, my younger sister and our pets…it is a tepid but constant squalor in the downstairs… is this what happens to a dream deferred?

I maneuver carefully through the bi-products of this spirit’s wretched intent with casual talismans…masks and drums and décor.

I am cleaning and organizing.

Washing the dishes again.

Behind me he is a grotesquerie of intent, a masterpiece of some sick artist who’s left his greatest work to stand and watch…me. I tell him he can’t stay. He’ll be needing to leave immediately. I continue working on the basement’s floors (you can’t stay), shelves (you can not stay), cracks (you must), closets, (you WILL leave), and the walls…The walls are what stand out.

I’m talking with my mom and kissing her forehead and just then I’m under her bedroom in the downstairs, right underneath where she lays and I’m hanging a mask. I know it is gone, there is a slow silence like the most beautiful new snow, There is light here and I awake.