Too Hot
Lying face down on my bed, I breathe effortlessly. It requires no application for it is no act of will. My ear turned to the mattress, I hear the dull rhythm of my heart slogging away. It pumps and pumps and pumps again, each pump marking the passing of a moment wasted, lost forever not to history but to nothing, for who shall remember these hollow beats that thud like a suitcase dragged cruelly down step after endless step? When comes the rest from this vain and wearisome toil? Who made this wretched and unwilling machine and said that it should sigh in, sigh out and pump and pump and pump, all the while giving off a fierce heat that none besides itself would know? Sweat breaks out upon my hands and feet and brow. I grow too hot against the mattress, this absurd assemblage of pump and pipe and bellows. Too hot, too hot! But there is no other blood or friendship in this bed with which to mingle, and for all my perspiration this heat might as well be the deathly chill of ice. In such a