I live with all the women I've broken
in a cottage in the country
and in the evening we drink tea.
We talk sometimes of love
but mostly we speak
of how much we hate me.

The night fades like cigarette smoke into the fog,
as dawn is brought upon the horizon by loon calls.
Used needles and condoms sit between the rocks.
The waves push plastic bags and empty bottles.
Ghosts of lost dreams are haunting the shoreline.
You're looking at me, while I'm looking for salvation.
Although you're with me, I'm still dying inside.
I blink, hoping for rain instead of the sunlight.
If this is living, I'm not sure I want to be alive.
But you touch my hand and I look at your face,
and somehow your smile brings me far from here.
The colors in your eyes take me somewhere nice.
I wish I could drown there instead of rotting here.
You blink; I wonder if your hell is anything like mine.
Are you wishing you could drown in my eyes,
seeking salvation, hoping for rain instead of sunlight?
I'll never ask, because I know you won't tell.
We don't speak of these things. We only feel them,
and we feel them alone, because that is how we are.
The waters crash against the rocks; you sigh,
and, now, I'm certain, you're as empty as I am.
That sigh says more than your words ever have.
Your mind is more polluted than the murky waters,
twice as grimy as the spaces between the rocks.
The ghosts of your lost dreams are waltzing with mine.
I'll stay here alone, wandering the haunted shoreline
if it means you'll drown somewhere nice in my eyes
instead of rotting in this awful place with me.

You sit at your screen
fingertips flying in the face of decency
like a spigot attached to a vat of arsenic
dripping your poison, slowly, surely into the ears of the unthinking.

You justify the burnt skin, the orphans, the unending torture as deserved.

Deserved?

How can it be so?

Go tell the orphan, scarred and screaming that her fate was deserved.

Go stand beside mass graves and thumb your nose at the deserving corpses, stained by the blood of ages.

Where is your heart? 
does it choke and sputter,
buried beneath your all encompassing loathing?

You call me stupid, maybe so,
my views naive, my compassion wasted
yet my heart beats proudly, swells with love 
while my tired eyes drown at the unfolding horror.

War is not a spectator sport,
it is not justifiable, nor deserved.

Call me stupid if you will, ridiculous if you must
call me any number of names in your attack on my spirit
I will not care, I will not bend or bow.
Your hatred will be your undoing.
Not mine