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+---
+title: Last bastion
+genre: verse
+
+id: last-bastion
+toc: "Last bastion"
+
+project:
+    title: Stark Raving
+    class: stark
+    order: 10
+    next:
+    - title: AMBER alert
+      link: amber-alert
+    - title: Initial conditions
+      link: initial-conditions
+    prev:
+    - title: 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][meek], 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][heart] blown dry by wind.
+
+[meek]: http://biblehub.com/matthew/5-5.htm
+[rats]: in-bed.html
+[mythical river]: music-433.html
+[heart]: sense-of-it.html