There was a demon in the cave of the mountain I asked him if he was bound to anyone in particular or if he was a free agent he asked me what it was that I needed him to do and what for I told him don't worry about that if you're free I have a job for you it'll be worth more than anyone's soul even your own I don't know how you think whether you'll consider it malevolent or benevolent but in the midst of the ride that we take in the places that we will go you will find a value in your strange ethereal existence that you could have never imagined an ecstasy that you never could have known... and so we rode practically drowning in the vast ocean of the sky in the sick and thirsty desert where hope grows in the form of a cactus every few miles; it keeps everything it needs from the greedy dirt giving nothing back unless you find yourself deranged in the middle of the desert in the middle of the night willing to ****** a cactus...i dropped him off at a Texaco. he was flustered and said he was running a fever but it was only fear I could smell. It leaking out of his semi porous Cactus skin. he had nowhere to go by the time that I was done with him he had become all but desensitized by sin. The last I heard he had started a family of his own: two girls and a boy and a wife who was faithful half the time. I tried to contact him by phone. he heard it was me and said it was bad reception and hung up. I asked a friend last month what happened to him. he said the last that he had heard he had fled the country and no one's seen him since. I can't quite remember what the task was that I needed help with..what it was that I had commissioned him to do....what we had set out for..... whatever it was I'm sure I accomplished it with eloquence, Elegance and genius to say the least. he's out there somewhere burying himself in the dirt of the desert trying to escape the darkness of his own fear.. losing sleep with the image of my cackling face gnawing at the back of his eyeballs from the inside of his nightmares. waking up blind and dead, wishing a cactus, like a venus fly trap, would break through the ceiling of his new cave and consume him back to the other realm. I've decorated his old cave, the haunt where I found him at peace, with chairs that snap when you sit in them like rat traps and a bed covered in glue in case he is ever compelled in a drunken peyote hallucinatory state to wander back ambling in and stumble into the Comfort the old life that he'd known so that as I make my rounds across this great malicious Earth I can find him again one day and become the cactus that consumes him.... Being now the cactus which consumes him while he is disintegrating somewhere in my churning bowels. passing him like a blackoutdrunk yesterday. Wondering when it is I will allow myself to die,, and where it is that I will go. conversing with the high noon moon. Grinning at me like a devil I once knew.