"Define life," he said, "In under seven words."
Several gave their answers,
cold and scientific, their wavering hands,
hoping for good reputations.

I had an answer.
The word leapt to my lips,
struggled to part them,
but I clenched my teeth to hold it back.

"Love." My heart whispered.
"We have not life,  if we have not love."

But love is not in the textbook.

Would you sing to me? Your voice calms me like the sound of cicadas in distant summer/I listened to the album you made me over and over, the way your voice glides into the notes, weaves itself into my bones/Your hair looks so beautiful in sunlight, soft sandstone red/ I love to see you smile, your secrets behind your teeth/Get dressed up and let me show you off, wear the dress that gives you Venus de Milo shoulders/I just can’t take my eyes off you, a rare star, unbridled constellations of your eyes/ let me draw you, capture your life in this small moment, paper and pensiveness/I just want to hold you, feel the needed press of our bodies/I need you right now, you are not my breath but I breathe easier when you are here/I’ll come over to your place tonight, I know you must be tired, I see the way the world wears us, slow drips of waxen time against our skin/I found this flower in the yard, it reminded me of you, the petals delicate in their sweetness, the strength in the roots/I love your family, their warmth a hearth fire, always returned to/Would you make some art for me? I see the way you pull beauty from the wound in your side/Read me some of your poetry, what does your soul sound like?/I wrote this poem for you, you are written on my soul/I wrote a song for you, words were not enough, here is the sound of us/would you play music with me? Let the harmonies carry outside our bodies/I carry your heart with me, I carry it with me.

Her smile stands like a porcelain lock,
lips closed like the red doors
to the Forbidden city.
Those blood-washed memories
will never dry in closed rooms.
Rust grows under her fingernails
smelling of iron and salt,
destroying the magic.
Her mixed drinks, peroxide and pain killers,
sleeping pills
stand on the nightstand,
after her one night stands,
leave the door standing open.
The cat knocked the glass over,
stained the carpet.
She locks the door again,
blotting the stain with her hair,
she chokes on the dust.
Swallows down the myrrh
to make her breath sweet,
wash the blood from her teeth.
The plastic wrap party dress
clings to the bruises,
and she paints it black with old mascara stains
and phone bills,
taping the pieces of herself together
with promises of old lovers.
The door opens
The lips lock,
porcelain smile.

It seems that depression
has a magnetic pull to poets.
We wear it, our stubborn scarlet letter,
Hidden between crinkled pages and ink spattered hands.
Our fickle muse,
if he stays around too long, he smothers us,
till we cannot even lift the pen,
and the words are left to swim around in circles
of darkening thought.

"Ma'm,
can you remember the name of that tree?
the one with the big leaves?"
He asks me, raising a withered hand
towards the young magnolia,
not yet blooming.
"Magnolia, I believe."
A light comes into his clouded eyes.
"Ah! Magnolia! Thank you."
he says, before shuffling away.
I pause for a moment.
Staring at the sapling.
Something stirs in memory.
Something deep, or shallow,
I cannot tell.
Memory, none the less.
I feel as though I should remember
a meaning behind the white flowers,
and broad leaves,
but I draw a blank.

The dark sour-mash smell of leather
hovers in the sweat-stained heat
As the truck snarls, awakened
its tires in their Sisyphean tread
find the familiar road around the lake
The rounding concentric lines of regret
I trace like an addled palmist.
When you spend so much time lost
you find comfort in the surety of banal paths.
I am an adult
But I never left the womb of this town,
wrinkled offspring of a tired mother
Who carries me in a low-slung belly
Drying and stretching in endless vessel.
She knows I tried to leave her once
Across the world
In another womb, green and fecund and full of death
and like the lukewarm believer I am,
I was spat out
crawled back to her.
She swallows me back up
Like the drowning boy in the lake
***** in water.
If only the weight in my mouth
Could float in water, like the styrofoam buoys
Could float to the top, in a dead man’s float
but it’s all too well-moored, concrete and clay.
I am silent
I am silent
Cruel mother,
You know I will never
Have the courage
To leave.

Mary Mary
quite contrary
Once the girl that never cried
You were Mary Beaton
And pretty Mary Seaton
And simple Mary Hamilton they all saw die.

Mary Mary
so you cry
To see the flames take breast and thigh
But heart takes hold for a thousand souls
Who hear their blasphemy no more.

Mary Mary
take his hands
And put them on your swollen waist
Make him love you
Make him touch you
Feel the phantom babe within.

Mary Mary
haunted face
The chapel so bereft of grace
curse Our Lady for her place
as she quickens see the kick
and your barren womb below.

Mary Mary
echoes call
the ghost of hopes that haunt the hall
Your darkened chamber lonely cast
reluctant lord to break the fast
two bodies strangers
one unchaste.

Mary Mary
sickened lie
the blood between your legs belies
the death that grows within your womb
around you languished hopes are strewn.

Mary Mary
So you die
with painful breath and blinded eye
The ****** takes your place at hand
with fecund fertile ******* she stands
to suckle the nation you could not nurse
for surely, you bore your mother's curse.

Masquerade

Hollow eyes in haunted faces
Concealed by lead and lace,
Pale as the pearls
They loop around their necks,
Beautiful nooses the hangmen wait eagerly to tighten.

We suffer under the grip
Of corsets pulled to tight to breathe
Pain with every breath we draw,
But force the smile, nod the head,
There’s never anything wrong here.

Blood drops fall from the hairline,
Running into eyes, behind sharp edged masks.
Masks changed too often, too fast, too soon
A different mask for every partner
Keep them strait, the order cannot be compromised.

Pirouette, spin, bow, change
Till you stumble, grab the wrong mask, take the wrong hand
The claws are unsheathed,
Shred the brocade, lace and silk
Cast you tattered from the light,
All a blur, chaos, till you stop, in the dark
Your only companion a remnant of your soul
Which lies bleeding at your feet.

I think my grandmother is convinced
that my ovaries will shrivel up
if I do not find a man by summer.

She was married by 19,
and has always wanted great grandchildren
she loves buying baby things, children's toys.
Kindergarten is the golden age of life.
I did not date in highschool,
but if she saw me looking at a boy,
she asked if he was single,
and told me to ask him over for dinner.

When I hit University,
I found a sweet, mad, mess of a boy
and she was quiet,
but we went our separate ways,
she started up again.

Scheming, the unwanted matchmaker.
Asking if the piano player at church was single,
(he's four years younger than I)
and trying to arrange play-dates for me
with unwitting high school acquaintances.

She means well, I know,
but despite the hopeless Romanticism I harbor
I know I need time, (there are still open wounds),
to fall back in love with myself,
before trying to fall for someone else.

I still remember how his dogtags felt around my neck.
They hung over my sternum, armor for the heart beneath.
Stamped-steel identity resting between my *******,
Name/SSN/USMC/O-POS/Christian
a piece of his soul, almost,
the soldier's lover's rosary.
I said more prayers than there were silver beads.
I'm still saying them.

Bruised and blistered hands
from digging up memories.
Someday, child, you will understand.
When your joints ache,and your skin is creased,
you will understand.
Your hands will sting against the shovel
raw from blisters you didn’t take the time to bandage.
Time is to precious to waste here.
No one wants to greet death
without these memories by their side.
Every bruise it worth it, dear.
Never forget to remember.
For when everything has slipped away,
youth is gone,
the places and people you knew,
vanished.
All you have are memories.
So dig them up.
Brush away the dirt,
turn them over in your hands.
It will all come back.

I will miss Autumn here.
The crisp days of October, startling the remnants of summer
into hiding.
The homely smell of hearth burned pine and smoked meat
drifting from chimneys built
by long-dead grandfathers.
The battle fields will be beautiful.
Bathed in maples,
harmless blood of leaves, though the earth
still bears streaks
of death.
The grasses, drying, dying, in the cooling air
will whisper to the sojourners passing through,
seeking sites of ancestors
whose voices they never knew.
I will not be here
to slip the fallen leaves
between phone-book pages or
paste and sew them
to handmade paper.
My mother will stare at the tangled thread,
the blank sheets,
left untouched on my desk,
and ask my father
where the time went.

The scratch at the back of my throat
will not go away.
It aches, burns,
In the same way my chest aches,
my eyes burn.
I miss you.
I know we can call, I can hear your voice
on the other end of the phone line,
tired, gentle, soft, but still distant.
As though it were a thousand miles
instead of a hundred.
Our words are muted, conversations short.
Full of "I love you"s, "Please don't worry"s, and (I'm afraid overly) hopeful "I'll see you soon"s.
But somehow, the voice doesn't seems like yours.
I've always equated your voice with your touch, I suppose.
It's strange for them to be separated.
I expect your chest against my back, your hand to caress mine.
But it's still that little light- the tiny candle we hold for each other.
The candle of hope. Lit with the flame of love.

He feels the ache
Mostly on Wednesdays
The limp emptiness, gaping
Like the sleeves of the forgotten jacket in the back of his closet.
The scent of his cologne is gone now
But in the morning, dressing,
He still thumbs the supple shell of the leather—
He hasn’t looked
But he is sure
He has worn a light spot into the left sleeve.
How many uptown nights
Under the harsh lights of the metro car
Did he reach for his arm
the taught muscle under the sleeve like warm stone
Feel the stitches over the pad of his thumb,
Before he placed a hand on his.

On Wednesdays,
He treats himself to takeout
From the corner store,
The creamy peanut sauce on bedraggled vegetables
Is enough to drown out the hunger
But between the bites of rice and curry
He still craves the
homemade broccoli cheddar soup and fresh bread,
Humming echoing in the kitchen in time to the rhythm of the chopping knife
A peck on the cheek
And the brush of his hands passing him the steaming bowl, warm and dry from washing.
His stomach growls.

He doesn’t smoke anymore
But he lapses
Mostly on Wednesdays
When the love-sick moon is visible
Between the high rises
A night like the one he left
Biting winter, the way icy concrete pierces bare feet
He sits in the open window sill,
Smoke flows into the dark like memory
the smell of nicotine
stirring relief and regret
It all feels
the same.

Sometimes I apologize
to silence
for the wrong
notes

Night flowers bloomed
in moments to rare for words.
It is morning,
and they have still not folded upon themselves
but turn to face the day
unfurling more beautifully
than before.

Saying that I didn't love you
sounds more like a truth
than the lie I want it to be.

And I do not know if this is because
my love starved to death, slowly,
or because I am malleable maleficence
and when arms are offered
I bend myself into them
automaton clay
deadly mimic
powerful enough to fool itself.

When I ask my heart
there is only static
the inoffensive murmur
I have trained myself to utter
Its voice lost
somewhere beneath a barrow of expectations
unmet.

Nostalgia: It sounds like a disease
And it has infected me.
Worming its way through veins and valves.
I caught it
from robbing the graves of memories.
Trying to gather
the silver linings from long dead moments
dusty laughs
that crumbled in my fingers,
moulding smiles that left spots on my hands
that burned.
out, out **** spot*
I lay down in the fresh earth,
cold, how cold it is.

I still recall the small, delicate, boy
on the ferry to Ellis Island,
With the large dove grey eyes
I'd never seen eyes so deep.
A girl will love you for those, someday
I told him telepathically.

Up top, where the wind blew,
The steel sky greeted us, in cool Manhattan fashion.
I watched a couple lean on the lattice railing.
They reminded me of  John and Yoko.
He looked like a boy--giddy with finding
a beautiful thing in his hands,
but unsure of how to handle it.
She had him gently wrapped around her finger,
tightening the knot with every smile.

I studied two old Orthodox Jews
beards streaked with fading black, faces wrinkled,
framed by the two thick curls
and staunch black hats.
I wondered what they thought of us,
teens in our jeans, disheveled from travel,
Or if they saw us at all.

I wonder if any remember me
the way I remember them.
Probably not.
No one takes notice
of the skinny red-head in the corner.

I am driving home under the melancholy grey sky that reminds you of the empty spaces in your chest. Sickly yellow street lamps are coming on, one by one, highlighting the potholes and cracks in the road. I can't help but picture what it might have looked like in the 60's. The still all American heartland town, when the rusted buildings were new and shining, when the once grand houses had fresh paint, well manicured yards, un-littered by fake deer and old tires. I remember old news papers from estate sale boxes, pictures of women in smart dresses with cinched waists, sitting prettily in the society section. They are probably dead now. Buried in the cemetery on a hill that overlooks the city, and down onto the tiny matchbox houses now boarded up or falling into disrepair. Still yet it seems maybe it was never new. There was always the dust, the smudge, the ghostly fog on old mirrors. I wonder how it will continue, or if it will at all, perpetually rise and fall, as all things do, or simply fall, the lifeblood of youth trickling out and down the freeway, or soaking into the already saturated ground.
     Hopeless seems so dark a word, but the truth was never pretty, was it? Perhaps, here, is the hardness of truth, in its grit, its blood. The pebbles that stick in your palms and skinned knees. They once said the depressed were the most realistic of us all, that it was the perpetual state of the human mind-- everyone else in optimistic denial. I was inclined to believe them. Our rose colored glasses taint the world cotton-candy pink while E-flat minor and discorded harmonies echo somewhere in the mountains, longing, hard, sad.
     What haunts you? I want to ask the old rail road tracks. Who died here? I say to the gaping cinder block house. Do you remember what laughter sounds like? I know you remember the bark of dogs, the screech of tires, gunshots or fireworks, who can tell. Dust the memories off the way we dusted sawdust and insulation from the boxes in the hoarder's attic-- find them suspended just the way you left them, open the room-- unchanged since the children left. The toys lie on the floor where they fell from small hands. The safest memories are the ones unremembered. The more they are recalled the more corrupted they become till we are painting our own picture all over again, and we are Van Gogh on a rainy night. Is that what happened? You remembered them all too often. You stared at the sun till you were blind and wondered why you could not see the stars. Yes, that must be it. You clutched those slips of laughter so greedily-- recalled them again and again until they faded, till now you hear nothing but the wind, and cough nothing but ashes.

Most days, I can fade into the cracked, plaster walls
in their peeling blue paint, smeared with oily hand prints
from wayward class demonstrations.
A prison cell? No. A holding cell? Maybe.
Where I am interrogated
through glossy textbook pages and sickly fluorescent lights
these castles of learning
are dim places indeed.

The world lost a beautiful soul today. But the beautiful thing about poets is that they never really die. Their secrets, their hopes, their most intimate thoughts are tucked between the lines, even in their most light hearted pieces. Poetry is a very honest medium. Maybe not as honest as sitting and having conversation over tea, but scraps of living soul are always left in the spaces between letters. David, Ovid, Homer, Shakespeare, all of these have survived the centuries as poets. I have no doubt that centuries from now, if our world is still turning, Maya Angelou's works will be counted among these eternal ranks.

This is how I’ll end;
not with a bang or a bonfire,
I’ve saved an apple for the pale rider’s horse,
and will smile when he bends down from the saddle
to carry me away.

My hands hunger,
Tired of holding themselves.
Of aching emptiness,
that permeates the metacarpals, the cuticles, and
especially the palms, where lines lie in wait
for another artist to trace them.

I dare not let you unlock
the clasp I cannot undo myself.
For what should spring forth,
from that Pandora's box,
amid pain, uncertainty, shame,
would tie and bind us in a thousand knots,
I know I could not untie.
And though you would cut free,
I know you would still have one, as a reminder of me.

My sister's friend broke his back
when he wrecked his car.
The night of, I met her, coming in from work late,
she was fumbling across the gravel to her car in the dark,
murmured a few words,
when I asked her where she was going.
Mum told me someone had called.
I remembered
Dad meeting me in the kitchen
murmuring a few words,
Making a few phone calls, late.

The next day
I went with her.
Walking along all to familiar hospital halls.
I remembered playing Amazing Grace
as a woman died,
her friend's eyes, glass.
And the man who told me my
Catgut and horsehair
sounded like angel's singing.
I thought it sounded hollow,
empty, cold,
like the corridors.

The ICU hummed quietly with beeps and whispers.  
His mother thanked us for coming
she embraced us, pressing her soft body against our ribs.
He lay there honest, disheveled.
The morphine loosened his tongue.
He told my sister he loved her,
over and over again.
"Your sister is great. Don't you just love her? I love her."
he told me.
She held his hand, blushing.
I remembered your voice
on the other end of the phone line,
scattered, your tongue loose and
saying anything that fell into your mouth
half-formed thoughts
mis-pronounced words,
and a thousand impotent
"Don't worry"s.

He healed.
Left hospital after a few weeks.
My sister had to tell him
she didn't love him like that.
and he hated her for it.
You left a few weeks after,
said you loved to easily.
I couldn't hate you.
But I also couldn't love you
like that.

In the night
Memories drift like the hair of a drowned man
The waves a callous lullaby
curling around the body of his sleeping wife
the unburdened curve of her hip against the moonlight
The drift of her breath in the dark
Coursing to match the sea wind
That sings across the lake’s dark mirror.
Her black hair spills across his hands
Ensnared, he pulls her in
To the harbor of his great shoulders—
It is the same
As it was on their first night
she is warm, small,
still smelling of the almond blossoms
she gathered in twilight.
But tonight, his impetuous heart is awake
Moving between the woman in his arms
And the messiah in the next room
the love he bears both
At once consuming
And unbinding,
his heart a stone
On which they both
rest.

The sigh of things gone,
echoes of hope and the
small prickles of a blackberry
as I turn it on my tongue
between knives of teeth.
I reach further into the bracken,
The tangle of thorns caressing, hooking themselves into my clothes,  
These are familiar pains,
Small scrapes of memory.
Petrichor, a reminder of our last walk
The clouds, tremendous waves breaking across the sky, coming storm
The plucked magnolia blossom wilting in my hand
How bitter it tasted on our tongues
I saw the berries, then, crimson unripe jewels
Vowed a Persephone return when they had turned onyx
And came back alone while you languished
In your underworld.

I can find sweetness amid the pain,
What have you found
To sustain  yourself ?

We will stand honestly together,
in the sfumato footsteps of the
centuries of lovers that met before us.
He will christen my eyes with kisses,
weave a crown of poetry in our intermingled locks,
whisper Neruda against my cheek.
We will smile
at the way our rib cages resemble wings,
our lungs, the birds, rising on each current
of fervent breath.

My Soul has fallen in love with Sorrow
they make love and call it poetry.
My Spirit thinks he has overstayed his welcome.

They say it’s okay in the end.
But I can think of so many times
when it wasn’t.
Or maybe that’s what death says
when he takes your hand.
”It’s okay…”

stand quietly here, love
yes, next to me.
Enough to feel the air pass between us,
between breaths,
as the wind gasps.
do you hear them, dear?
those voices the Echoes bring to us?
Ghastly, aren't they.
******, dark voices,
wrought and rent like the chests they came from.
Look at them, darling.
watch their feet melt into red earth.
their hands, too, fraught with iron.
Faces, see their faces?
There is your father, your husband, your brother, your son, dear.
Your daughter, your wife, your sister, your mother.
See their hollow mouths agape?
Hear their voices screaming?
That's what pain sounds like.
Your heart is making the same noise, isn't it?
I can hear it.
This is hell, love.
Just another part of life,
and death, I suppose.
It's all a circle anyway.
This is where we learned
to spell hell with three letters.
Remember that, dear,
remember that.

I hold nothing against you.
These spines are in my chest
clutched like a sacred heart grenade
with fingers too close to let the blood through.
Driven in desperation
cyclone of nonsense and the neurotic
marred by nothing and marred by all
and the red dash trenches
with no man's land slowly decreasing
but too many futile-over -the-tops
for far away victory.
Fruitless as the wavering charge
one step forward
two hundred back
Stalingrad psychosis.
Shell-shock guilt and the stark reality
of one's own mind and the prisons it builds.
Peace is a forgotten word
not even whispered in dreams.
Freedom drowned in the mud.

He offered her forbidden fruit.
She took it.
No questions asked, only glances given.
She sank her teeth into it as if it were a Georgia peach.
It was sweet, but
one taste,
and she knew why God had told her
never to touch it.
She tried to hand it back
and he started to take it,
then threw it back at her,
saying,
she had ruined it.

The promethean draw of winter stars
new leaves bathed in twinkling lights
hung by the low-slung Moon
sweet, love-sick pearl
called by the Sea and unable to answer--
You roll the clouds in waves across the sky
cloaking yourself when it is too painful
for him to see
what he cannot hold.

Beauty is pain.
It draws them in like flies.
They have caught their legs
in my flypaper hair.
And rip them off, one by one.
They fall like eyelashes into my palm.
They love, they love.
I cannot.

TW: eating disorder*




I am walking underwater.
The food I will not let myself eat
falls into the garbage disposal with the thud of voided misuse
a rising steam of self-hatred
as my mouth hangs open
hungry,
waiting for endorphins that never come
and self-denial still does not
meet my confessional act of contrite penance
it still feels like a sin
to eat
or not to eat
and there is no pleasure in gluttony
or in fast.

Driving, late, the air is close, the wet contingent of molecules
Gathering across my cheeks, under my eyes.
A dog as white as the moon
Streaks across the road like a fallen star
Sirius descending to earthen night
caressed by a woolen fog, carded by sleepy winds.
The shattered carcass of a bird
crops up from the asphalt
I swerve, leaning against the inertia
the hare's heart spike of my own pulse.
There is a softness to the dark
these small scenes of ghostly death,
a solitude in the hem of night
That somehow feels safer
Than day’s garish glare.

Self,
Here are the ways you have been loved
Instead of the ways you have lost it.

You have known love the color of autumn dogwood  
The deep red of want
Rising in the cheeks like steam.
The magnetic pull of moon and stars
Orbits spinning until they are null
The rush of blood in the ears
Tempests in the paths of plans.

You have known love the shade of fall juniper
The argent blue of constancy
Silver dust on fingertips
Invisible until tasted.
Pepper and pine, the flavor of rain
And washes of hope.

You have known love the hue of October roses
The bittersweet fragile pink
Bright and fast and pure
delicate as a dream on waking,
fading in the opening of an eye,
Its memory more solid than its time.

Self,
You have loved and loved and loved
And you have been loved.
And on the nights this does not fill your cup
When your arms are empty
Your voice dry,
Wait, work, and wonder
Through solstice, equinox, eclipse,
For each in their season returns and returns
And all seasons come anew.

The scrape of thought--
like the scrape of skin
on the bare threads of a sheetless mattress.
Limbs, like the first lines of a journal,
******, new,
waiting for the scars and the stories that follow
as bodies move together,
so slowly as to atrophy.
Memories echo in the silence
light careening through the window,
and words we can't remember teasing our tongues.
I could have asked you so much, and so little.
These are the stories we tell our inner selves,
the half-truths we justify
and the lies we ignore.
The moments we relive until they are frayed
beyond memory,
beyond repair,
the quiet brush of hands
over a tattered blanket.

Us and all our lonely ghosts
shells, empty,
trying to fill the gaps in
with lover's flesh and ink.
Whiskey to warm our ribs,
seal us air-tight,
and drown the monsters
we can't write out of us.
Suffocate the **** things
before they learn how to swim.
Haunted, but not horrified,
we've seen ashes before.
We only wait for the March winds
to blow them away
and light
just
one
     last
          spark.

I feel so lost without you,
my north star,
my comfort at the end of days.
There may as well be light years between us
and that destroys me.

You're golden in the light of grief
romanticized, I know,
but right now,
don't care.

I am frightened
the world will break me,
wring brittle bones in iron fists
till they lie in porcelain shatters.
All the king's horses
and all the kings men,
will sweep me under the rug
with half of history,
and a score of lost souls.

To my left,
there is the Neoclassical beauty,
profile drawn by David himself,
delicate,
bright eyes, reminiscent of Gainsborough.

The Rubeniste sits in front of me,
full figured, though not as colorful
as the Graces.

Behind me lurks the Rembrandt,
moody, dark,
in the chiaroscuro of a leather jacket
and tousled hair.

Here I am.
With my Schiele hands,
Rosetti lips,
but without the quiet grace
or distortion of either.

Looking back,
I found prayers scribbled in the margins
of my sociology notes.
Sometimes,
I am unsure if God still lives
or if we have killed him.
But considering the answers those prayers received,
I believe He is still kicking.

I determine to die loved.
Even if it is only
by myself.

The proximal end of my soul is no longer safe
Decay has dilapidated the space
The raveled fragments fester
Leaves wilting with vinegar burns
Where I have tried to **** the infestation
And found I was only killing myself.

I can remember when my mind was softer, but not safer,
Hiding in the hallway to the den
Watching the scene of the desperate father
pulling his dead son from burned rubble
My child mind imagining
Blooms of orange around my bedposts,
tendrils of cinder and smoke,
Placing my hand against the back of the door
To feel the phantom heat.

And now I hold the matches to my own bed
The quiet comforter can only stifle them for a moment
There is not enough weight to press
These dreams out of myself
Maybe I still crave heat because it is the pain that is also comfort
It is the fear and the foment, the ailment and the aid
It is my body asking for enough feeling
To know it is alive and safe
While my mind is screaming fire
in a crowded
theatre.