---
title: Last bastion
genre: verse

id: last-bastion
toc: "Last bastion"

project:
    title: Stark Raving
    class: 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