Push all your chips into the middle and turn your cards over. The deception ends here.
The roads closing, it’s a dead end, the man comes to collect. Let divinity play it’s role, let god decide, and the twist of your wrist, you get what you deserve. The dice fall gently down, hitting the felt and turning to their rightful place. You buy at the price you deserve.
Did the odds matter in the end? You pocket kings lost to 6–9 suited, on the river. Straight.
That was all the chips you had, so you turn around, firmly pick up your charcoal-black jean jacket, leave the table and walk over to the grey atm machine, the screen lights up and glares dauntingly at you. There’s a fee, there’s always a fee. A fee for pleasure and pain.
Your accounts empty, somewhere along the way you played your last hand. So you walk back to the table, and firmly declare that your seats open, to no-one in particular. As you walk out and pass the various slot machines with fancy lights and tigers growling, pretty ladies with curled monroe hair and rose-red lipstick sit seductively besides old grizzled, suited men. They smoke their cigarettes which they hold onto gently through slim black gloves.
Do they know they are in pain? Are they? I see a young couple laughing and holding onto each other, the girl pretends to slap her partner’s face and he smiles fully at her, his blue eyes seem calm and happy, his smile tells a story in itself. Love perhaps, or something else.
I keep walking, all I can think of is getting back to the table and winning it big next time. I should have won, the odds were in my favour, so I walk down the carpet stairs and out the door as the cold bites my face, ah, feeling, I let out a sigh and continue walking down the sidewalk. Cars growl as they speed by, I hear laughter somewhere, and a man cries out in pain, wailing, yelling at somewhere, perhaps an old lover. The tree’s beside the way sit peacefully as I turn the corner, there’s a water fountain in the middle of the opening coloured with blocked rouge stones.
I keep walking. And I keep walking, for some reason I don’t turn around, never, maybe I’m afraid. I don’t let them in, the thoughts, I get up and leave, again, and again, and eventually I arrive, at nowhere, there’s nothing. It’s a dead end.
