His senses hold him prisoner,  
Overwhelmed and alone.  
The walls are his burden;  
The light, too much to bear.  

The soaked linen of yesterday’s news,  
Stained with fear from battles before—  
An old uniform hangs alone,  
Boots polished beside paper awards.  

Headlights cast broken shadows,  
Each a spectre of the past.  
Empty scotch bottles and cigarette burns  
Mark a slow crawl to solitude.  

Light burns through a slither 
His heart beats through the walls.  
Strangled by the sirens  
That triggered him before.  

He needs to be cradled,  
Yet no hand reaches for him.  
He sways back and forth,  
A pendulum of grief.  

Screams, muted by paralysis;  
Silence pervades the void.  
Fractured by a rasping breath  
And a crescendo of emotions.  

The warning bells pass—  
They did not come for him.  
His fragile breath of sorrow  
Whispers to an empty room.  

By Darren Wall ©

~
she's thunderstorms.
she's asphodel meadows.

I fall outside of her
into the suburbs of askew,
where she hides behind
happy occident, where she
lives with the afterlife of a man,
but is in love with a scientist.

a jaded thing, she likes
to drop anvils on her
husband's head and blame
her fragile scaffolding,
she wears the wreckage
on her face, it's far easier
than admit her own fallacies.

before the children came along
she was able to pour some
of her own frustrations
into these knotty tussles.

now the midwives have left.
now misadventures in her
own backyard commence.

no hiding place down
the front of her,
the remaining secrets
come from underneath.

but if you trust her
and go along, she knows exactly
where to lay her hands.
~

---TW: themes of self harm---


I'm hungry,
******* hungry.
I'm not really in the mood
For the moldy apples in my fridge.
My brain is hungry though,
******' hungry.

A nagging, a pulling, and a tapping.
The urges crawl to and fro in the back of my skull,
Like drunken, confused spiders.
I roll my eyes back
To take a peep at the spiders,
And I stare at them for a while.
Their clumsy crawling is mesmerizing;
I can't look away, even though I want to.

The stomach growls,
The skin quivers,
And the aroma rises.
The blood running in my veins,
Along with the goosebumps on my skin
Are tantalizing.
Why does it smell better than any actual meal?
My thoughts begin to narrow in on my hunger,
On my skin,
And on my hunger,
And on my skin,
And on the box cutter,
And on my hunger,
And on my skin.
Eventually it's all I can think about,
God ******.

I bite and groan;
I bite and wail.
The guilt consumes me,
But the hunger consumes me
With an even sharper bite.

Have you ever been so infatuated with someone that you thought you’d die? My memories are fresh - and embarrassing - there’s no sense of time’s distortion.

I was twelve and we were living in Shenzhen, China.
When my heart went off like a grenade for this fourteen year old boy.
I was so beguiled that I started writing poetry - always a bad sign.

I was exposed - turned inside out by it;
like my guts were hung out for birds to peck.
I writhed in that particular, lonely agony.

All I ever had to offer him was my helplessness.
He didn’t take advantage - I think I scared him.
I wonder what memories he took from me?

The last generation
asked for success.
Our generation
asked to be left alone.
This generation
asks only to mitigate
the pain.

–Ron Gavalik

Tawny days hanging from the sweet autumn breeze are sheltered in corners of my mind I just can’t dare to go to. I hide from them, never closing my eyes—never looking inward. I open them into another haze, though. The dimmest streetlight in the most darksome alley. But between blinks, my eyes burn in golden, and images of remote places flicker in.

Patches of brown leaves on the ground, fragments of Shakespearean poetry carved on trees, a lonely grove between mountains, and a magic lake by my hiding place…

“You would never understand,” I had said to him after weeks of sleeping under willows and sneaking in the cottage through the window. “You don’t know what’s it like to be chased for crimes you didn’t do!” The soldiers had been drawing nearer to the towns about, and I had been left with no choice but to flee from the fate that being an outsider threw at me. “Don’t go,” he had said before my fears revived in my head, killing all peace.....