Those few shy sun rays
That fill the saddest valleys
With the grace of their warmness
Are not aware of the joy they bring when
They steal their way in from the 70's clouds
White, grey and dark as the night
Choked by the rage of the stormy skies
Putting up with our accusing eyes
Blaming them for this furious weather
Not knowing that they're under the pain and pressure
Of the scrunchy lightening tearing them up like a whip
Few of them survive while others slip
Between the hands of the mad forces pushing them to cry
Yes, they boil with the urge to pry
As raindrops ,as cold as the heavens' heart,
With the demons pressing "restart",
Soak us with the filthy rain
Of this silly, slavering game
Every round that a devil gains

The embers died and I extinguished every burning flame with my breath
The fire inside me glowed so brightly I could not see,
and the flickering candle-lit lanterns of my eyes brimmed with water
and the roaring blaze inside me died
I inhaled smoke trying to reignite what once thrived
my nicotine lips smelt like ash and my heart was a burnt out cinder
I washed the smell of smoke from my fingertips
the same fingertips that fires used to lick and nibble,
caressing the skin that held a furnace within
Nothing but smoke and ash left inside me now
And blackened lungs from years of fueling the very object that would be my demise
I drowned in a flood created by my own weak self
it washed away my sins, yes, but I was made entirely of sins
and now I am a hollowed out shell of the bonfire I used to be
I was engulfed in a shower of tears that diminished the essence of my being
Now I am nothing but ash and cigarette smoke.

If i wrote a story, it would be a tragedy. But it would not be about the blood that flows from my legs at night when my mother thinks im sleeping. It would not be about the days wasted crying because no one could hear me when i broke. It would not include the story of two 3 year olds who lost a loving father they barely had enough time to know, or a loving wife who had the light of her life taken by the forces of death. It would not be about the darkness that engulfed my friend, who then became the darkness, and bled away into the shadows to join the ghosts that called so softly to him, he could not resist. It would not be a story of the girl who took over 100 tablets in 3 days because of a boy she loved who told her to do it, and the pressures weighing on her shoulders were pushing her into an early grave. It would not be the tragedy of her survival and the continuous pain and shame that she endures to this day. No. my story would be about the futility of life's arrangement and how the world around us is crumbling to dust and we are doing nothing. It would be about the thousands who are starving and crying who no one seems to give a **** about because they're the 'minorities'. It would be about life's cycle with death, and how so many are ripped from loving families before their time because the universe works in cruel ways, and -if there is a god- he or she is moving chess pieces across their board and watching them crumble. My story would be about the skilled children and poets that no one has heard of because, as everyone knows "its not cool to write poetry" . My tragedy would be about the injustice of law and how those in love are denied being bound to one another because they are of the same ***. It would be about the millions lost to wars that history repeats again and again and again over new, yet just as trivial things. This is not my tragedy. This is everyone's.

A) I'm tired of lists
and writers who can hardly breathe
when they wake up in the morning
telling me how to wash him out of my hair,
and how to hug my father when I'm sad.
I don't have a father.

B) They never tell you how empty you'll feel
when you finally leave him. It's for the best, you know,
you deserve someone who loves you. Not that he didn't.

C) What the **** am I supposed to do or choose or say?

D) You can fall in love with yourself,
but that's not a prerequisite for love.
You are deserving of love regardless
of where you are in your journey.  

E) Stop listening to people who tell you
boys don't fall in love with sad girls.
You don't want a boy, you want a man,
and he will fall in love with you - a woman.
Your depression does not define you,
you are so much more than that, and he knows.

F) Most of all, do not listen
to your friends
that try to explain life to you
in lists.

i. i have convinced myself i look the most beautiful with bruises and
hair that has not been brushed.
ii. sensitivity is my virtue. i wear it on my eyelashes and cry it all
off so i look like a raccoon waiting to be abandoned.
iii. i think if you opened me up inside you would find
books with dog-eared pages and
dandelions.
iv. if i fall in love with you, hold me down with cords
and fabrications.
v. i’m wearing lipstick too much, because all i can think of
lately is your fingers in my mouth and the
cliffs i need to jump off
of.

We writers are insane.
All of us.
We revel in our own sad mess
While picking green grapes
Off the wallpaper,
Smecking away like mad
At the wondrous juices
Of the imaginary, judicial
Forbidden Fruit.

We, like Hemingway,
Take our scotch in the morning
And our gin at night
And try with brutal, lashing effort
To make it through
Everything in-between.

We have put ourselves in shoes
We will never be able to walk in.
We must walk miles as
Linguists, as
Assassins, as
Outsiders, as
victims, as
AIDS sufferers, as
Brutalizers of women.
We must deal with their pain
As if it were housed in our own entity of being.

J.D. Salinger wrote that
His literary son, Holden,
Wore a “people-shooting” hat and
Made it **** clear that he suffered from wild
And erratic fits of overwhelming depression.
Writing from a bunker
Far from his wife, kids and home,
His stories sparked ****** in the hearts
Of already oppressed men
With “people-shooting” hats of their own.
We must toil with language;
Put it in the corner,
Love it, hate it,
Shift it and slave daily with it.
We must lose hours upon hours upon
Days of sleep
Before we find ourselves
Dangerously asleep at the wheel in front of us
In order to make the slightest change in our regular ways.
Even then,
Our handwriting only becomes sloppier
And our words,
Only fiercer.

Kaysen, alone in a psych ward
With women who slept around and
Tried to maul each other,
Wrote diligently
To try to release the the demon
Boiling the very blood inside her veins.
But demons do not disappear easily
And unfortunately,
Neither do the tortuous memories.

Even today,
They attempt to label me
With words of the disturbed.
Anxiety
Floods my synapses and neurons.
Depression
Happily urinates on my serotonin levels.
I bring myself to write
The effigy of the ******
Day by day
As my pen scratches paper
And the doctors expect razor to scratch skin
Though it never has
And never will.

Writers are psychos.
We all are.
We remain the mad, psychotic, literate monsters
Who worm our ways
Into your head.
We nestle beside your dreams and fantasies,
Waiting to strike
And tear them apart or,
If you’re lucky,
Build them up.
A woman writer named Sylvia
Once put her head in the oven
Because the writer-demons were driving her to madness
And they wouldn’t leave her be.

Handling us is a torture
Only the most eloquent and experienced reader
Could enjoy.

Love Always,
Salinger and
Plath and
Kesey and
Vonnegut and
Burgess and
King and
Sandburg and
Snicket and
Hemingway and
Palahniuk and
Kaysen and
Gaimen and
Green and
Trumbo and…

Holtry.

Getting on
through a trying work hour in the night-time rush,
groped by strangers with dark eyes
the color of neglect and whiskey.
Men with knives under their sleeves,
calling you back and back again,
refills for their poison and pretzels for the table,
don't be a *****, darling.
I only want to feel those hands trembling
under mine.
All you ever knew were the bruises and the burns.
Gliding closer and closer to
your face, your hands,
inching towards the skin that gleams, exposed
and invokes the shame you feel from
fetid breath on your neck, these
animals with moldering livers.
but another round for the men in the grease and grime.
Green bottles and a smile that said
'I like the taste of your weakness,
You like the abuse.'

Of a’ the airts the wind can blaw,
  I dearly like the west,
For there the bonnie lassie lives,
  The lassie I lo’e best:
There wild woods grow, and rivers row,
  And monie a hill between;
But day and night my fancy’s flight
  Is ever wi’ my Jean.

I see her in the dewy flowers,
  I see her sweet and fair:
I hear her in the tunefu’ birds,
  I hear her charm the air:
There ’s not a bonnie flower that springs
  By fountain, shaw, or green;
There ’s not a bonnie bird that sings,
  But minds me o’ my Jean.