There was once a girl
Who loved the rain
And a boy
Who loved the sun

They met one day
In the drunken moonlight
Fireflies fell from the trees
Burning out before dawn

His hands were warm
And her's were cold

They breathed in unison
Opposites
Their eyes flickering
Against the sinking sky

"You make my heart race."
He said.
"You make my heart slow."
She whispered.

The sunlight stabbed the night
And the moon fell
Out of sight
Pulling down
A thousand clouds

"Kiss me,"
He demanded.
And she did.

red fragments of plastic litter the
sandy soil at my feet
i gather them with one at a time
while my soul searches for a song to impart
my pen grows strange in my hand
its words have a feel to them
foreign deranged

the phrases float disjointedly
they refuse to knit into a poem
while my mind is troubled by a scattering
of autumn winds
the red fragments arranged randomly
on the small backyard table
sunshine illuminates each with precise clarity
the fragments are my poem
and i shuffle the pieces back and forth
trying with a maddened mind
to knit them into a beautiful bird
but they only keep forming the ugly face distorted
they keep moving of their own accord
to form a jagged edge
i breath and **** at my coffee mug

the red fragments thorny in my head
they have sand clinging to them
and bits of the brackish water that
the nights rain had left for me
these words are incomplete visions
mere phrases like incongruous men walking
random paths in a field
when two meet they shout their ideas
at eachother and part company full of
suspicious glares
a draft of this randomly worded madness
flows from my unwilling pen
the red fragmentation
of the incomplete poem

Only a moment ago stood a father
Keys in his hands to a truck that lost its driver
To a bad decision and a bottle of beer
Sitting in a dark room is a bed
That will no longer hold a body

Down the hall a mother breaks
Feeling the loss of a last breath
As if it were her own punctured lungs
Hitting the steering wheel
As water floods the engine

Two men stand at her doorstep
One refusing to look her in the eyes
The other apologizing for his words
That should never be said
For the labeling of childless parents

Before this moment a boy sat
Posed as a man on the edge of a bar stool
Consuming his death wish through his lips
An apology engraved in the fold of his throat
Giving an approximation to his silence

Give me a minute
To read the stars
Lamenting in their stories
Their laboured twinkling far and sparse

Give me this moment
To stumble and swoon
My branches reaching for
The faraway moon

Give me a while
To be one with the universe
Hear the colliding planets
As they spill their mournful verse

Give me some time
To plot my rightful place
Within my uncharted galaxy
And collapsing space...

It's in his shadow we plead
Under his wrath we bleed
His destruction leaks hate into the weak
Leaving the unsubstantial reaping his critique
His actions scorned through years of neglect
It's in his perception only, that we become wrecked
Why do we follow knowing wrong from right
Pushing those we love away from the light
His power is without doubt equal to the greats
Although derived from stray minded it opens the gates
The gates into the souls of those who are tattered
Turning old memories to ones now shattered
Although through it all, we have nothing to fear
For he is nothing more than a broken mirror
It just takes practice to realize his weakness
All his power is nothing to the strong but bleakness
It's in his own prison he will rot
Although it's up to us to become the Juggernaut

-Joseph B Schneider