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This appears in a pre-2010 issue of Down in the Dirt magazine. Saddle-stitched issues are no longer printed, but you can requesting it “re-released” through amazon sale as a 6" x 9" ISBN# book! Email us for re-release to order.

INHALING LOST SOULS,
DRINKING CORPSES,
EATING A CUP OF INSANITY

Mel Waldman

Inside the Office of Oblivion, I inhale lost souls for breakfast,
drink corpses for lunch, and eat a cup of insanity for supper.
What does it mean to be a shrink in the House of the Dead?
Enmeshed in my daily routines of madness, I sit with freaks
who dance naked in my psyche.

Inside my subterranean office six stories below Grand Central
Station, I listen to dark confessions. I am not a priest or rabbi.
Merely a therapist banished to this wasteland of darkness, the
very first of my kind to explore these depths. It is very hot down
here. Of course, my anonymous, alien boss has given me an
air conditioner. But it is a broken-down piece of machinery-weak,
ineffective, and antediluvian.

There’s also a rusty fan in the corner of this steamy, rectangular
room. Almost defunct, it will melt in a poignant moment of
existential angst, in this seething cesspool where human debris
dissolve in a cauldron of despair, disappearing inside the invisible
office where I exist.

Now, a young girl drifts into the Office of Oblivion, floating across
the foggy room like a corpse at sea in sweet phantasmagoria. Yet
she is still alive and desperately sucking on the polluted air, exhaling
her moribund soul and other toxins. I inhale the poisonous gas
emitted from her parched lips and wait.


The circular silence is like a noose separating and connecting us,
seducing us with death. In my timeless office, she will eventually
reveal the cutting grief that severed her soul-the sweeping sadness
that led her through a dark labyrinth to an underground guillotine-
the Office of Oblivion-to find me-and be safe within the shadows
of an invisible room.

She will reveal... And afterwards, one by one, the others will drift
into the Office of Oblivion. What does it mean? Don’t know. I sit
and wait for them. They will come, like tomorrow, and another day
at the office, inhaling lost souls, drinking corpses, eating a cup of
insanity.

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