Lobster Headed Son of a Gun

The little redheaded prick followed me everywhere
Down all the impossibly long and numerous stairs
Into the crooked basement
Where the walls were a few degrees off
And the doorways were never square
My OCD alarms pinging off the pegs

"Are these walls supposed to look like this?
Does that door look crooked to you?
What was that noise?
Sounded like a dog
If he were half a cat....."

He never shut up
His little ruby rubbery pie hole kept spewing annoyance
I wanted to smother him
I didn't even know who he was
Didn't he have some parents?
He should really go home

But the longer I wandered in this impossible hotel
The less I wondered about where he was supposed to be
In this limbo
In this purgatory
We were apparently paired up
He had nowhere else to go

So I suffered his intrusions
His questions
His presence
Everywhere I went
Always a little too close
Just inside my bubble
Never heeding my request to back off
At least not for more than thirty seconds

After an eternity
Of pondering and wandering
In and out of the semi-deserted complex
We spied a new way
That felt like an old way
A way down and out
Just outside our little world

A huge gaping maw of a pit
Old beams and fixtures lining the walls down
Uneven and dangerous looking
With train tracks at the bottom
Two of them

Sitting on the edge for a spell
Trains going by in both directions at regular intervals
We decided to go down
Because this must be how to go

How to go where
I don't know

And it seemed as if we'd come up from there to begin with
In some other life
Some other day
In our distant sunset of a past

Over the edge I sent that little redheaded bastard first
My companion
My irritation
I held his smaller arms with my hands
As his feet searched for the first beam
On the crumbling wall

"There are lots of things to grab onto
Don't worry
I think it gets easier as you go down"

Just then
His arms came out of my grip
And my leg jerked as I scuttled back from the edge in horror
His scream coming back out of the dark hole at me
Cut short by a soft crumpling thud
Following in seconds by the sound of another train
Merrily going on it's way
Full steam ahead
Eyes forward unseeing
Lighting the darkness

Even as I try to light my own darkness now
As I continue to wander the old now empty hotel complex
Nothing all around but dream desolation
Filled with sandworms I suspect
And I cannot walk without rhythm
So I'm trapped on this concrete island

No little redhead to annoy me anymore
No incessant questions
Except the ones in my own head
That I keep asking over and over

"Why did I send him down there?
Did I let go of him too soon?
Did I feel myself kick his head with my jerking leg?"

I don't think I'll every know for sure
As I sit here and wander there as a party of one
With a nagging suspicion in the back of my head
That the little redheaded boy might have been my son