I've read the news, and it's red with painted lip prints, and the stain of stranger thumbprints. They're not mine. Neither of them. They belong, lip and thumb, paint and stranger, singularly to those others who don't read or write such things. They may bleed, them, but the blood isn't red, or crimson, or cardinal, or scarlet. Pick a shade of red, and it isn't that, at least not until it's too, too late to stanch. The bully's standard is to take it all, all of it except the fall crisp that led into this strangely warmer winter. I took it, and I saved it in my bones to prepare, but the cold didn't come. Not like we were used to. I'm told the bully wears what he takes with a dashing style. See it, that royal blue that outfits him? The flowing robes? The gold. I've been robbed. We have been. Not of things, but of a view. A view with no room for us in its downside-up very periscope-unlike perspective. There's no upside to the up-down and just around the corner trips I take. To the grocer. To the bar. To the five and dime. It's fattened up to a dollar. And the slimming newsprint costs more than what I get without the paper. I don't get it, not the print, not the paper, not the red lip prints, not the thumbprints left by strangers, not the news I've read and I'm reading.