Meditation

The skin of his knuckles split obediently between bone and brick. His forehead is fevered with rage in stark contrast to the cool stone it is grinding against. His arms are the pistons of a locomotive's combustion engine, as he pounds away against the brick wall that he knows will never be deteriorated by his punishment. His hands, however, have already begun to. But he doesn't care. The pain is what he came here for. To this darkened back alley in the wrong part of town. The same part of town everyone visits to do their own personal dirty deeds. Among hookers, dealers, hustlers, certifiable madmen, and street urchins he feels noble and downright spiritual.
"Everything you need to be happy is within yourself." The psychiatrist at the Mental Hospital had said. This new breed of white suburban bodhisattvas sickened him. He hated to watch centuries of eastern religion and philosophy co-opted for American self-help books. And now here he was, co-opting it for his own purposes. This thought only made him angrier. Red trickles down the wall; the one thing in this world that he knows is irrevocably his.
So he pounds away on nigh invulnerable brick, knowing that the only one he has to blame is himself. For all the things he rued about the state of his psyche, no one could ever accuse him of being in denial. Quite the opposite is true, as he plants his feet in the cement, face to face with this city, trying to make it all go away, one feeble attack at a time. He watches his blood trickle down the wall, and through constant jolts of painful release, sees the only thing is this world that no one can take away from him. This blood is his.
He leaves pieces of himself behind, as he turns and walks away. Dogs judge territory by less than this. His hands are first bruised, then bloodied and finally broken: Bruised as his ego. Broken like the spell his rage had cast. He walks into the open street a humbled man, shoulders sunken with fatigue, chest heaving impassioned puffs into cold air.