old & alone

having made enough money to support himself for a while

on the market,

he set himself up in a small basement apartment---

there, he was able to make his guesses &

rake it in,

surviving on his own &

being thrifty the whole way through.

 

in time,

the man’s need for affection began to eat at him &

the itch grew worse---

having learned his lesson years before in a relationship

that went sour,

his ability to trust anyone had deteriorated completely,

which ironically made him focus better on the stocks

but forced him to endure a lonely existence without intimacy.

 

he soon found himself ordering escorts &

call girls,

to remind himself of what it was like to have physical contact with

a woman &

as time went by,

the market began to fluctuate &

his guessing began to get hazy---

suddenly, sooner than later, he found himself

quite broke.

 

when the whole thing caved in on itself,

little guys like him were flushed under the bridge &

he was having trouble now, paying for anything but his rent---

he regretted paying all that money to the women who had

frequented his abode &

he regretted betting a good portion of his life on the market,

as if things would never change.

 

darkness began to devour all the areas of his life that had once

bore light &

he stopped getting up in the morning to get on the train to work---

after being fired,

he stopped getting up at all.

 

the landline began to ring incessantly,

as the bill collectors started to knock on his door---

he would bang drumsticks on the pad he’d set up to relieve his stress &

try to think of a way out of it all,

but nothing seemed to surface.

 

at this point he stopped eating &

he huddled himself in a corner in the basement---

when the landlord came downstairs to ask for the rent,

this man, his tenant,

once mildly successful,

had been reduced to an emaciated figure

who seemed to almost disappear in the shadows of the

stairwell.

 

“you need to eat something,” the landlord told him,

and he went back upstairs to get the man some food---

it was evident to the landlord that this man whom he’d

thought he’d known for years,

was now trying to starve himself.

 

the landlord returned with a bowl of food & set it down next to him,

not unlike a dog owner would do when feeding his dog---

the man, whose eyes now sunken in like Nosferatu,

smiled & thanked his landlord---

“i guess that i should eat something,” he said.

 

the landlord asked his tenant if he wanted to go to the hospital,

and the man, now eating a little bit, nodded---

the kindness in the eyes of the landlord

didn’t shock the tenant, for he’d known this man for years,

but the two whose ages were relatively close

differed in many ways.

 

upstairs, the man who had come to this country poor &

worked himself up the ladder on his own,

driving a taxi, getting a medallion, buying property slowly &

renting it out,

had a beautiful wife & a couple of daughters

who were always laughing &

making a ruckus---

the tenant had no one in the world

but him.