Dear Mr. Cupid,

I hope you are well. Please forgive this letter’s intrusion. I know you are busy, preparing your bow, and planning this season’s collusions. I’ll remind you though Sir, of the issue I had with the last year’s arrow consignment. Your aim was amiss, and I’d be remiss if I failed to seek your reassignment. I’d like somebody new to deliver my true - love for which I have been waiting. For it has been so long since my wife ran along, and everyone says that I should be dating. So please, if you would send somebody good to shoot Love's arrow at me. Thank you in advance for forgoing this dance.

Sincerely,
Mr. Oso Lonely

ever see a lightning bolt -
and hear no thunder?

My notebook has a stain
That I placed there.
For I wanted to cover,
The lines where I wrote your name.

It takes up some space,
This anthracite black smudge.
So unlike you,
For there is no more space for you

Here
In the pages of my heart.
I have removed you.
And threw you into the shredder.

So as the ink seeps through,
Making this mark final,
I turn the page
And write anew.

Come here, love.
Let's try to make something
Out of our suffering tonight.

We are two
Dead, dry sticks together
That hope for a flame.

There are no right answers.
The sky rejects the birds, turns them
over to gravity,
embedding them in the concrete and dirt.
The grit refuses to become a pearl,
just as the wound refuses to heal
and the flesh eats itself.
The market sees a sudden spike in
sales of Champagne and cyanide.
Coordinated efforts seek and fail
to curtail the rising tide of violence
in the nation's dreaming.
You realise that this crude, barbaric language
that you can't understand
is your own.
Beauty glitches and pixelates.
Frightened, furtive confessions of love
are unheard over proud, visceral
proclamations of hate.
Tongues divorce mouths.
Every now and then, a voice
inside your head says,
'Thud.'
The measures of sanity become
more quantifiable and
totally arbitrary.
The horizon
tightens
like
a noose.

It doesn't matter if this is wrong.
There are no right answers.