---
title: Last bastion
genre: verse

project:
    title: Stark Raving
    css: 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