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+---
+title: Last bastion
+genre: verse
+
+project:
+    title: Stark Raving
+    css: stark
+    order: 10
+    next:
+    - title: AMBER alert
+      link: amber-alert
+    - title: 1. Initial conditions
+      link: initial-conditions
+    prev:
+    - title: 4. The Sixteenth Chapel
+      link: sixteenth-chapel.txt
+    - title: Boy on the bus
+      link: boy_bus
+...
+
+Dimly remembered celebrity chefs shuffle \
+down the cold and darkened highways of the heart. \
+They are the last personality left. They are the meek \
+who inherited the heart, what was left of it. \
+Without food to cook in new or exciting ways \
+nor audience to gasp and cackle, the chefs \
+of the heart quietly waste away while staring \
+doe-eyed into now-empty Safeway windows \
+checking under the dusty produce shelves \
+for something they pray the rats haven't found yet.
+
+Years ago, the economy of the heart boomed \
+and there was food everywhere. Produce \
+piled high in pyramids of devotion, meat in \
+gilded glass cases opulent under fluorescence, \
+dairy which ran like the mythical river toward \
+cereals hot and cold. Under it all, thrumming \
+like great stone wheels on sand under a hot sun \
+near a river where reeds sang in the wind \
+the heart produced and gave reward for hard labor.
+
+No one knows when it all ended. No one can say \
+if it was the heart that dried up or the heart's supply. \
+Either way, food of the heart became scarcer and scarcer. \
+People began dying, not of starvation \
+but of a certain facial expression that could only \
+be described as desperation. Now \
+all that are left are the celebrity chefs, last bastion \
+of a once mighty empire of the heart \
+are reduced to husks blown dry by wind.