chi hua hua Tartar

young Mr. Lakiavitis
thought he would end it all around noon
on January 2.
the first of the year had been too inauspicious,
and there was the important matter of
waiting to see whether he would be evicted or not,
and his lawyer, Mr. Small,
would have to be contacted
for this determination.

but otherwise his plan
was to fling himself
from his 9th-floor rent-controlled apartment
which his parents owned,
in the building
where he was known
as the withdrawn young man
never without headphones,
into the frigid Manhattan street below.

New York city had received
almost two feet of icy blizzard over the holidays,
and many of its services were
as paralyzed and incapable
as the despairing
mind of Mr. Lakiavitis.

so that when he screwed himself up
to the herculean task of self-defenestration,
his long liberating plunge to the frozen street below,
to escape all the
confusion and humiliation and disappointment
he had known
in his brief city-bound 26 years,
ended with what could have only been
an anticlimactic sound of busting rubbish
and air escaping from many stuffed trash-bags.
Refuse sacks piled high on snow drifts
all over the city
and neglected by the sanitation department for days,
prevented him from escaping
his life's bleak, sullen, dirty anguish.

but he was able to break his back
and develop further financial ruin.
Hello, cruel world,
he may have muttered,
as he waited for the ambulance.