A Poem for Three Voices

Setting:  A Maternity Ward and round about

FIRST VOICE:
I am slow as the world.  I am very patient,
Turning through my time, the suns and stars
Regarding me with attention.
The moon's concern is more personal:
She passes and repasses, luminous as a nurse.
Is she sorry for what will happen?  I do not think so.
She is simply astonished at fertility.

When I walk out, I am a great event.
I do not have to think, or even rehearse.
What happens in me will happen without attention.
The pheasant stands on the hill;
He is arranging his brown feathers.
I cannot help smiling at what it is I know.
Leaves and petals attend me.  I am ready.

SECOND VOICE:
When I first saw it, the small red seep, I did not believe it.
I watched the men walk about me in the office.  They were so flat!
There was something about them like cardboard, and now I had caught it,
That flat, flat, flatness from which ideas, destructions,
Bulldozers, guillotines, white chambers of shrieks proceed,
Endlessly proceed--and the cold angels, the abstractions.
I sat at my desk in my stockings, my high heels,

And the man I work for laughed:  'Have you seen something awful?
You are so white, suddenly.'  And I said nothing.
I saw death in the bare trees, a deprivation.
I could not believe it.  Is it so difficult
For the spirit to conceive a face, a mouth?
The letters proceed from these black keys, and these black keys proceed
From my alphabetical fingers, ordering parts,

Parts, bits, cogs, the shining multiples.
I am dying as I sit.  I lose a dimension.
Trains roar in my ears, departures, departures!
The silver track of time empties into the distance,
The white sky empties of its promise, like a cup.
These are my feet, these mechanical echoes.
Tap, tap, tap, steel pegs.  I am found wanting.

This is a disease I carry home, this is a death.
Again, this is a death.  Is it the air,
The particles of destruction I **** up?  Am I a pulse
That wanes and wanes, facing the cold angel?
Is this my lover then?  This death, this death?
As a child I loved a lichen-bitten name.
Is this the one sin then, this old dead love of death?

THIRD VOICE:
I remember the minute when I knew for sure.
The willows were chilling,
The face in the pool was beautiful, but not mine--
It had a consequential look, like everything else,
And all I could see was dangers:  doves and words,
Stars and showers of gold--conceptions, conceptions!
I remember a white, cold wing

And the great swan, with its terrible look,
Coming at me, like a castle, from the top of the river.
There is a snake in swans.
He glided by; his eye had a black meaning.
I saw the world in it--small, mean and black,
Every little word hooked to every little word, and act to act.
A hot blue day had budded into something.

I wasn't ready.  The white clouds rearing
Aside were dragging me in four directions.
I wasn't ready.
I had no reverence.
I thought I could deny the consequence--
But it was too late for that.  It was too late, and the face
Went on shaping itself with love, as if I was ready.

SECOND VOICE:
It is a world of snow now.  I am not at home.
How white these sheets are.  The faces have no features.
They are bald and impossible, like the faces of my children,
Those little sick ones that elude my arms.
Other children do not touch me:  they are terrible.
They have too many colors, too much life.  They are not quiet,
Quiet, like the little emptinesses I carry.

I have had my chances.  I have tried and tried.
I have stitched life into me like a rare *****,
And walked carefully, precariously, like something rare.
I have tried not to think too hard.  I have tried to be natural.
I have tried to be blind in love, like other women,
Blind in my bed, with my dear blind sweet one,
Not looking, through the thick dark, for the face of another.

I did not look.  But still the face was there,
The face of the unborn one that loved its perfections,
The face of the dead one that could only be perfect
In its easy peace, could only keep holy so.
And then there were other faces.  The faces of nations,
Governments, parliaments, societies,
The faceless faces of important men.

It is these men I mind:
They are so jealous of anything that is not flat!  They are jealous gods
That would have the whole world flat because they are.
I see the Father conversing with the Son.
Such flatness cannot but be holy.
'Let us make a heaven,' they say.
'Let us flatten and launder the grossness from these souls.'

FIRST VOICE:
I am calm.  I am calm.  It is the calm before something awful:
The yellow minute before the wind walks, when the leaves
Turn up their hands, their pallors.  It is so quiet here.
The sheets, the faces, are white and stopped, like clocks.
Voices stand back and flatten.  Their visible hieroglyphs
Flatten to parchment screens to keep the wind off.
They paint such secrets in Arabic, Chinese!

I am dumb and brown.  I am a seed about to break.
The brownness is my dead self, and it is sullen:
It does not wish to be more, or different.
Dusk hoods me in blue now, like a Mary.
O color of distance and forgetfulness!--
When will it be, the second when Time breaks
And eternity engulfs it, and I drown utterly?

I talk to myself, myself only, set apart--
Swabbed and lurid with disinfectants, sacrificial.
Waiting lies heavy on my lids.  It lies like sleep,
Like a big sea.  Far off, far off, I feel the first wave tug
Its cargo of agony toward me, inescapable, tidal.
And I, a shell, echoing on this white beach
Face the voices that overwhelm, the terrible element.

THIRD VOICE:
I am a mountain now, among mountainy women.
The doctors move among us as if our bigness
Frightened the mind.  They smile like fools.
They are to blame for what I am, and they know it.
They hug their flatness like a kind of health.
And what if they found themselves surprised, as I did?
They would go mad with it.

And what if two lives leaked between my thighs?
I have seen the white clean chamber with its instruments.
It is a place of shrieks.  It is not happy.
'This is where you will come when you are ready.'
The night lights are flat red moons.  They are dull with blood.
I am not ready for anything to happen.
I should have murdered this, that murders me.

FIRST VOICE:
There is no miracle more cruel than this.
I am dragged by the horses, the iron hooves.
I last.  I last it out.  I accomplish a work.
Dark tunnel, through which hurtle the visitations,
The visitations, the manifestations, the startled faces.
I am the center of an atrocity.
What pains, what sorrows must I be mothering?

Can such innocence **** and ****?  It milks my life.
The trees wither in the street.  The rain is corrosive.
I taste it on my tongue, and the workable horrors,
The horrors that stand and idle, the slighted godmothers
With their hearts that tick and tick, with their satchels of instruments.
I shall be a wall and a roof, protecting.
I shall be a sky and a hill of good:  O let me be!

A power is growing on me, an old tenacity.
I am breaking apart like the world.  There is this blackness,
This ram of blackness.  I fold my hands on a mountain.
The air is thick.  It is thick with this working.
I am used.  I am drummed into use.
My eyes are squeezed by this blackness.
I see nothing.

SECOND VOICE:
I am accused.  I dream of massacres.
I am a garden of black and red agonies.  I drink them,
Hating myself, hating and fearing.  And now the world conceives
Its end and runs toward it, arms held out in love.
It is a love of death that sickens everything.
A dead sun stains the newsprint.  It is red.
I lose life after life.  The dark earth drinks them.

She is the vampire of us all.  So she supports us,
Fattens us, is kind.  Her mouth is red.
I know her.  I know her intimately--
Old winter-face, old barren one, old time bomb.
Men have used her meanly.  She will eat them.
Eat them, eat them, eat them in the end.
The sun is down.  I die.  I make a death.

FIRST VOICE:
Who is he, this blue, furious boy,
Shiny and strange, as if he had hurtled from a star?
He is looking so angrily!
He flew into the room, a shriek at his heel.
The blue color pales.  He is human after all.
A red lotus opens in its bowl of blood;
They are stitching me up with silk, as if I were a material.

What did my fingers do before they held him?
What did my heart do, with its love?
I have never seen a thing so clear.
His lids are like the lilac-flower
And soft as a moth, his breath.
I shall not let go.
There is no guile or warp in him.  May he keep so.

SECOND VOICE:
There is the moon in the high window.  It is over.
How winter fills my soul!  And that chalk light
Laying its scales on the windows, the windows of empty offices,
Empty schoolrooms, empty churches.  O so much emptiness!
There is this cessation.  This terrible cessation of everything.
These bodies mounded around me now, these polar sleepers--
What blue, moony ray ices their dreams?

I feel it enter me, cold, alien, like an instrument.
And that mad, hard face at the end of it, that O-mouth
Open in its gape of perpetual grieving.
It is she that drags the blood-black sea around
Month after month, with its voices of failure.
I am helpless as the sea at the end of her string.
I am restless.  Restless and useless.  I, too, create corpses.

I shall move north.  I shall move into a long blackness.
I see myself as a shadow, neither man nor woman,
Neither a woman, happy to be like a man, nor a man
Blunt and flat enough to feel no lack.  I feel a lack.
I hold my fingers up, ten white pickets.
See, the darkness is leaking from the cracks.
I cannot contain it.  I cannot contain my life.

I shall be a heroine of the peripheral.
I shall not be accused by isolate buttons,
Holes in the heels of socks, the white mute faces
Of unanswered letters, coffined in a letter case.
I shall not be accused, I shall not be accused.
The clock shall not find me wanting, nor these stars
That rivet in place abyss after abyss.

THIRD VOICE:
I see her in my sleep, my red, terrible girl.
She is crying through the glass that separates us.
She is crying, and she is furious.
Her cries are hooks that catch and grate like cats.
It is by these hooks she climbs to my notice.
She is crying at the dark, or at the stars
That at such a distance from us shine and whirl.

I think her little head is carved in wood,
A red, hard wood, eyes shut and mouth wide open.
And from the open mouth issue sharp cries
Scratching at my sleep like arrows,
Scratching at my sleep, and entering my side.
My daughter has no teeth.  Her mouth is wide.
It utters such dark sounds it cannot be good.

FIRST VOICE:
What is it that flings these innocent souls at us?
Look, they are so exhausted, they are all flat out
In their canvas-sided cots, names tied to their wrists,
The little silver trophies they've come so far for.
There are some with thick black hair, there are some bald.
Their skin tints are pink or sallow, brown or red;
They are beginning to remember their differences.

I think they are made of water; they have no expression.
Their features are sleeping, like light on quiet water.
They are the real monks and nuns in their identical garments.
I see them showering like stars on to the world--
On India, Africa, America, these miraculous ones,
These pure, small images.  They smell of milk.
Their footsoles are untouched.  They are walkers of air.

Can nothingness be so prodigal?
Here is my son.
His wide eye is that general, flat blue.
He is turning to me like a little, blind, bright plant.
One cry.  It is the hook I hang on.
And I am a river of milk.
I am a warm hill.

SECOND VOICE:
I am not ugly.  I am even beautiful.
The mirror gives back a woman without deformity.
The nurses give back my clothes, and an identity.
It is usual, they say, for such a thing to happen.
It is usual in my life, and the lives of others.
I am one in five, something like that.  I am not hopeless.
I am beautiful as a statistic.  Here is my lipstick.

I draw on the old mouth.
The red mouth I put by with my identity
A day ago, two days, three days ago.  It was a Friday.
I do not even need a holiday; I can go to work today.
I can love my husband, who will understand.
Who will love me through the blur of my deformity
As if I had lost an eye, a leg, a tongue.

And so I stand, a little sightless.  So I walk
Away on wheels, instead of legs, they serve as well.
And learn to speak with fingers, not a tongue.
The body is resourceful.
The body of a starfish can grow back its arms
And newts are prodigal in legs.  And may I be
As prodigal in what lacks me.

THIRD VOICE:
She is a small island, asleep and peaceful,
And I am a white ship hooting:  Goodbye, goodbye.
The day is blazing.  It is very mournful.
The flowers in this room are red and tropical.
They have lived behind glass all their lives, they have been cared for
        tenderly.
Now they face a winter of white sheets, white faces.
There is very little to go into my suitcase.

There are the clothes of a fat woman I do not know.
There is my comb and brush.  There is an emptiness.
I am so vulnerable suddenly.
I am a wound walking out of hospital.
I am a wound that they are letting go.
I leave my health behind.  I leave someone
Who would adhere to me:  I undo her fingers like bandages:  I go.

SECOND VOICE:
I am myself again.  There are no loose ends.
I am bled white as wax, I have no attachments.
I am flat and virginal, which means nothing has happened,
Nothing that cannot be erased, ripped up and scrapped, begun again.
There little black twigs do not think to bud,
Nor do these dry, dry gutters dream of rain.
This woman who meets me in windows--she is neat.

So neat she is transparent, like a spirit.
how shyly she superimposes her neat self
On the inferno of African oranges, the heel-hung pigs.
She is deferring to reality.
It is I.  It is I--
Tasting the bitterness between my teeth.
The incalculable malice of the everyday.

FIRST VOICE:
How long can I be a wall, keeping the wind off?
How long can I be
Gentling the sun with the shade of my hand,
Intercepting the blue bolts of a cold moon?
The voices of loneliness, the voices of sorrow
Lap at my back ineluctably.
How shall it soften them, this little lullaby?

How long can I be a wall around my green property?
How long can my hands
Be a bandage to his hurt, and my words
Bright birds in the sky, consoling, consoling?
It is a terrible thing
To be so open:  it is as if my heart
Put on a face and walked into the world.

THIRD VOICE:
Today the colleges are drunk with spring.
My black gown is a little funeral:
It shows I am serious.
The books I carry wedge into my side.
I had an old wound once, but it is healing.
I had a dream of an island, red with cries.
It was a dream, and did not mean a thing.

FIRST VOICE:
Dawn flowers in the great elm outside the house.
The swifts are back.  They are shrieking like paper rockets.
I hear the sound of the hours
Widen and die in the hedgerows.  I hear the moo of cows.
The colors replenish themselves, and the wet
Thatch smokes in the sun.
The narcissi open white faces in the orchard.

I am reassured.  I am reassured.
These are the clear bright colors of the nursery,
The talking ducks, the happy lambs.
I am simple again.  I believe in miracles.
I do not believe in those terrible children
Who injure my sleep with their white eyes, their fingerless hands.
They are not mine.  They do not belong to me.

I shall meditate upon normality.
I shall meditate upon my little son.
He does not walk. &n

So I've got this story...
And it goes a little something like this-

There's a girl that I hurt really bad on way too many occasions that I love more than anything. Pretty much everything I write on here is about her. She became the love of my life, and I told myself she was the one I wanted to spend my life with. Except I was a ****. She was going somewhere to an event that lasted 2 weeks and was really important to her and let's just say I ****** it all up really really bad. She made a lot of friends there and it was a great experience for her, kind of like camp is for some people, how boy/girl scouts are for some people, and she learned a lot there, and had lots of fun too. I was so horrible to do what I did.

At least we're young though, and there's still time to grow...right? I'm only 18, she's almost 18, and we both have lives to live ahead of us. I feel like I need her though. She treated me perfectly in our relationship. I mean, looking back, there's nothing I can fault her for, at all. I just got ****** at stupid crap that doesn't even matter.

Except, she's into somebody else now and probably thinks I'm no good for her. She doesn't talk to me anymore. Anyway, I'm rambling, I haven't gone to bed, I took a bunch of pills, am getting sick, and it's 7 AM...so here goes. This story is somewhat censored, though.

_________________­___________
"The Worst Weeks of Our Lives"

I met this girl and she became the love of my life. She took me places I'd never gone before and her and I fell in love like some people wouldn't believe. Ask my friends. Ask her friends. No, her friends probably wouldn't admit to it anymore. But I choose to remember the things they said. Kids were like totally rooting for us all day every day. We were so perfect. It was great.

So with a few mistakes here and there, (mostly me...all me, really) we realized we weren't perfect. But it didn't hamper out love. Nobody is perfect, right? We realized that. Overcame.

But then, we went too far. Her parents drew lines we weren't supposed to cross. Oopsies. Her mom really put me in my place. I'll just leave it at that. Asked me when my 18th birthday was, so she could mark her calendar as the "day she could touch me". Told me I was a liar. Husband in the background drunk and screaming, as usual. Except screaming "that ***** ain't sorry. He ain't ******* sorry, ******* ******* marking up my ******* daughter I can show him how to be ******* sorry"

Lots more. I'll go crazy if I speak the rest. It was a hickey on her neck. We didn't do much more.

I got really scared. I mean, they were brutal. I wasn't used to that kind of brutal. Psychotic levels of brutal. All of the sudden I became numb. I stopped being so intimate with my girlfriend. They told me not to come around their house anymore. I started doubting myself. If I was any good for her. She cried and cried. Told me how sorry she was. For getting us in trouble, and for what her parents did. But it wasn't her fault. After all, I am the vampire that bit her neck.

After a few weeks, her parents dropped it completely. I didn't though. I was so traumatized. I'd been getting flashbacks. Nightmares. So scared, I was. I kept avoiding her, not only her parents. I mean, I didn't have a car anyways, so the only place I could go to see her was at her house. She reassured me I was allowed. But with no contact with her parents since the phone call that changed my life I was reluctant.

This was around 2 months before she was going to go to a 2 week event. A special event to her. One I'd even wished I'd gotten involved in. Really, I did wish. I just missed the application deadline. Throughout the next two months, we grew more and more distant. I was harsh on her. I hurt her. I'd get mad at her and then call her and talk to her until 3 in the morning. I made her hate herself, and then she felt bad about me feeling sorry too. "You always force yourself to be nice to me just so I feel better, but I'm ****, I'm trash, I'm nothing, I'm so sorry" she would say. Most of the time, she didn't even do anything wrong. One of my best friends died at the same time her parents killed me inside, I spent all my days sleeping and crying and when I wasn't doing that, I was getting angry at her (and quickly regretting it), manufacturing conflicts that were completely unnecessary. Not to mention I'd had health issues, and my parents kicked me out of my house a few months beforehand.

In the time before she left to her special event, I really tore her up. I said the dumbest things I've ever said to someone in my life. I'd never even said such dumb things to even an object, or myself. Why I would say them to a girl who saved me from suicide (I was very unstable and depressed when coming out of a bad relationship, and getting kicked out of home) and why I said it all to someone I wanted to spend my life with I'll never know.

The dumbest things I'll ever say to anything that breathes in my lifetime. I told her one night that the "only reason I was still with her was because if I left she'd hurt herself" (she had a history of self harm, even though she's the sweetest girl I've ever met) and another night I told her "If only she were going somewhere important I'd understand" and lots of other insensitive and selfish things that I can't even believe came out of my mouth. I mean, the whole basis of it was that her and I hadn't spent much time together (really because of my own selfish fears) and I was going all *** on her testosterone-fueled-rage style for days over and over and over.

Don't I sound like a horrible person? I was. I was horrible to her. As much as I hate to say it, I'll probably make similar mistakes again someday - It's like relapsing - but I'll make every effort I can to learn from my horrible past and never be that person again.

So when she went to the event, I was with my grandparents out of state and I downloaded my favorite sad playlist (Staind, great band) to listen to on the trip.

Yes, seriously. I told her that stuff and called her event unimportant and then I went away too. How stupid I was for what I said. I should have been slapped or something.

A day or two after I'd left, I realized how stupid it was of me. For the whole thing. That whole time. That whole span, those two months where I not only neglected her, but emotionally ****** her.

There's a song called "Tangled Up In You" that has the most wonderful and intimate lyrics and I listened to it and sung to it over and over and over late into the morning (I'm talking 3-4 in the morning) every night for like 10 days and along with a song called "Right Here" by the same band. I cried myself to sleep so extremely ashamed of what I'd just done to her.

I knew I was wrong, but what I didn't know was that she was crying her eyes out wrapped up in (someone else)'s arms at that event...
I didn't know she was getting all kinds of love and support.
I had no idea...not that it was bad, it was good because she needed it.

But it got her to thinking about me, what kind of person I was.
When we both got back, I started making more of an effort to spend time with her and go out of my way to talk to her, make her happy, and basically, stop being such a ****.
Except she just got confused and conflicted because she was numb and falling out of love, because I was nothing that anyone should love, to her, over that prior time.

Her mom broke us up about a month later, after some...you know what, I'll just leave that bit out...
I told you how the first phone call went. The phone calls I got from her and her husband in the end were just so much worse. I don't even want to think about them. I went into convulsions and kept dropping the phone.

I went back to these two songs to help keep my sanity and I belted out "Tangled Up In You" every day in my car... so loud I was losing my voice.

I'd had some communication with her, surprised her at her work one night, bought her flowers, wrote her my true feelings on some napkins, showed up when she got out of school one day, when she was deathly afraid, and surprised her with a smile and drew a heart on her hand...

Her and I were on the same page. She still loved me. She was just hurt. I still loved her. I was just trying to make up for the compromised mental state I spent so much time in. I had compromised hers too. I needed to get her out of it. She told me she would wait for me. That we were in a speed bump, that it would all be okay.

So some weeks passed, a month, and she still had my back. As strong as ever. Her parents found out I bought the flowers. They found out I'd been talking to her. But...

Knowing she still had my back, that she still loved me, and that she would wait for me...she called what her mom did (in breaking us up, in our break) a "speed bump"...I was okay with it. I mean, I really wanted to be a part of her life, but man, her parents HATED ME! (In retrospect, probably with good reason. Shame on me for the things I did to her. Really.)

We had some major issues (mostly due to my inability to shut my stupid mouth) and I decided that maybe some time to ourselves to focus on ourselves and think was a good thing. She could focus on loving herself again and I could focus on becoming a better person.

I mean, when her parents found out her and I were still talking to each other after they broke us up, they blocked my number on her phone, went to my church and made up extra stories to my pastor, (told him I'd came and banged on their door at one in the morning one night), when I called to apologize to them they didn't pick up, called me back later to cuss me out and hang up on me, logged into their daughters facebook account and blocked me, then told their daughter that I had called them when she was sleeping and cussed them both out, and that she was to have nothing to do with me again. They threatened legal action against me, too. Tried to make my life hell. They didn't want me around their daughter, ever again. A blind rage that went on for a very long time until every communication route was blocked.

She went to school and told her friends the false stories her parents told her, and her friends already didn't like me...I mean just look at what I had done before...it wasn't good. Not for me, anyway. Also her. She felt duped. Used. By her parents. She didn't know who to trust or what was real. Everyone was telling her how horrible I was.

I got a chance to talk to her one day. We talked for hours, face to face. Sat in the cold and talked. It was an amazing talk. We caught each other up completely on our lives. We talked about our love. Our past. Our emotions. All of them. Good and bad. But we told each other we'd always love each other. She stuck by me, and also reassured me that she always would. I left that conversation feeling so secure. The most I'd felt since way before I'd become a total **** to her. When her and I were so deep in love.

She's always wanted to go far away from college. She told me stories of her past and what her parents did to her, what she did to herself that were not good. Not good at all. She wanted to get away from her parents.

Meanwhile I was so caught up in the feelings she gave me when I was in her arms, I almost couldn't handle the fact that she wanted to leave. I pleaded for her to stay, in a time that her and I were both unstable and it was already taboo that we were even on the same property. But still, she said "she wanted to stay" because her and I work so well together...when we work together, that is, and I and her were both determined to work together. I told her I would do anything for her. In all of it though, I told her that the decision was in her hands and I would still love her the same if she left, and that I would wait for her. Because I loved her more than anything.

After that talk, things got quiet. I guess, too quiet. I was legally bound to stay away from her. I talked to someone she worked with and asked them to tell her hello for me. I thought though, we were on good terms following the talk, I thought she'd be elated to hear from me.

She never responded.

One day, a couple weeks later, she told me I really needed to get over her. That she didn't love me like that anymore. She told me she'd been falling out of love since the summer, and she'd gone crazy and needed space. She said she wanted to be friends, but no relationship. No relationship anymore. She said she couldn't handle it. She said she couldn't handle a relationship in general.

She made that message a bit accusatory. I'd been talking to two friends, one who I'd known for years and a new one I'd just made. Both overlapping friends with hers. Those two helped keep me sane.

She started that message with "I heard you've been messaging my friends, and to be honest, I haven't had the heart to message you back." She repeated multiple times that I needed to get over her. She told me that it wasn't anyone else's influence too. She even listed people. People who'd separated us. Hurt me. Hurt her, in a way, but encouraged her in others.

At the same time, she blocked me on facebook again. She had unblocked me when she found out her parents did it for her. Odd though...I thought she wanted to be friends. I mean, it was like the only way I was able to have her in my life at all. To read her facebook posts and her read mine. To have discussions with friends. We have a lot of overlapping friends.

Man, she killed me. One second I thought she was my soul mate and the next I was in the bathroom puking my guts out because she was telling me we'd never be together again.


So fast forward to today...I still love her. And she's basically in a relationship with someone else. She's also either on the fence about her sexuality, or decided she doesn't like boys anymore. I feel bad about that too. Its like I ruined male relationships for her. It's only been a few weeks since she told me I needed to get over her. She doesn't talk to me anymore. I go to high school events even though I graduated last year just to see her. When I don't approach her, she ignores me. I'm just another person in the room. When I do approach her, she has such a scared look on her face. She doesn't want to talk to me, but she can't be mean to me. She's falling in love with someone else and she's getting happier. She doesn't need me showing up everywhere just to depress her.

Yet I keep bothering her. Because I'm a sucker for her. I can't help it. I love her. I want her to be my future. But at this point I'm grasping at straws. So hard. I shouldn't be trying anymore. But I'll end up trying until the day I die. And only then will I stop believing in her and I. I know it's a pipe dream. But I'll hold onto it. Because it's the only thing I have left of myself now.

Last night, (I mean, right before I wrote this around 5 AM, it is now 8 AM) I played those two songs again. I forgot they were at the end of my playlist and I started shivering and crying my eyes out. I got chills. I got so cold. The tears just ran. They ran down my face faster than I've cried in a long, long time.

I'm only okay right now because I took a bunch of pills. Pills that have this kind of effect on me. They make me kind of numb. Kind of happy. Upper and downer both.

That's pretty much, my sad ending to a sad story.
I'm living the kind of life that only people like Shane Koyczan know how to explain to people.

Ironically, she loves Shane Koyczan.
I do too.
We grew up in broken homes and lived broken lives until we found each other.
Then we broke each other.

But she's falling for someone else, because I wasn't what I should have been to her, and she knows
But she doesn't believe in me anymore, the way I believe in her...because I wasn't what I should have been to her, and she can't hold onto me when I'm a 50/50 chance, of bringing her down again.
If only she would let me hug her again, kiss her one more time...I could die happy, knowing I poured all my heart and soul out into that last kiss.
But I'm a gamble. And she can't put her heart out on the line for someone who wasn't always good to her. She used to call me her "sweet boy" and she still tells me I'll always be her "sweet boy", but the fact of the matter is, it doesn't cut it to only be sweet s

Everything faded to black. He had a hard time remembering just what the hell happened. He wasn't sure of downing some random pills from of the medicine cabinet-- his first attempt to end it all. Making sure he would not recover-- if the pills didn't do the job-- he had already devised the set up of the noose in his bedroom. Definitely, he didn't recall anyone cutting the rope, forcing him down to the floor.

Lacie joked with him. "Dude, you've got nine lives! You must really be a ****, fricking cat in disguise! That's why you'll eat those nasty tuna fish sandwiches they serve in the nuthouse! "

Chris grinned at her.  He had to agree. To refer to it as the psych ward at the hospital made it seem like more of a jail term, but calling it "the nuthouse" lightened up the severity of the situation. As grave and nearly tragic as everything  had become, it was kind of laughable to him.  He supposed he had more chances than a cat's fabled life. It all seemed so crazy that it must be funny.

Well, what could he say? He had flirted with death, but unwillingly managed to escape its grip. "Pathetic..."--he commented. "I don't not even know how to die well..."

Chris  eventually realized that he had been rushed to the hospital, but wished it wasn't true. Since then, everything was either a total blur or a bizarre state of mind . Even waking up in his room was like a remotely vague memory, almost like a long ago dream that might not really have happened.

Maybe, he was somewhat aware that his sister was screaming in shock and horror at the sight of him, shouting out downstairs to her boyfriend to help her. But the walls were turning red, a glowing scarlet- red, with an added fiery orange and yellowish-gold-- all joined together in pulsating embers. He was quickly losing consciousness. It was like some, bad acid trip. Not that Chris knew this firsthand, but it sure was like something he saw on TV or at the movies.

And now he was the star of the horror show.

Did he die?  Death was what he planned on, so waking up was not a relief, or a reality back into motion--just the opposite. It was as if being awake was the real nightmare, a delusional time when everything was not true, and was only an scary, offbeat version of the life of Chris Cartier.

The bad acid trip continued. He recalled hospital staff rushing about him, seeming like real people-- sort of. Then they morphed into fish in scrubs. From overhead, an IV was dripping into his arm. Tubes were shoved down his throat. His vital signs were displayed on a screen that made beeps and sounds, increasing the chaos and adding to the mayhem to his mind. Soon, the vital signs machine started talking to him that he was a "very bad boy" and other such scoldings.

He was thoroughly freaked out. If he was still alive, he'd rather be dead.

He wanted to run. One of the fish pushed him back down and muttered out undecipherable utterances-- like underwater gibberish . Then that fish used its slimy fins to inject him with a needle in his arm. The other fish circled around him like fish out of water--with opening and closing mouths-- as if gasping for air.

As they surrounded him as rubber monkeys shot out from the walls and bounced all over the room. On top of all this madness, the florescent lights above were flickering on and off, in sync to the wild music, like the drum beats of a distant jungle. It was one bizarre tangle of events, a freaky, crazy, out-of-control ride in which reality could not be distinguished from the animation and mass confusion. It was one overpowering ride that he would much rather forget.

When Chris got out of critical condition, he found out that he could still not go home. That would take a few weeks more. Dr. What-The-Hell's-His-Name assured him that he needed to start on the path to his psychological healing--just as grave as the physical--right here in a safe place.

It didn't seem so safe to him.

The enemy wasn't what was out there in the world, but the big, bad wolf was actually him. He had to be protected from the true culprit--himself-- and that was a mind-blowing concept. Just what did he get himself into?   

He never had been a patient in a hospital before. In all his twenty-six years, he didn't so much as even have his tonsils out. Feeling now like a prisoner,, he was still scared out of his mind-- as if it was day one all over again. When was he going to get out of here? Chris began to fear that they would never let him out. No professional had a definitive answer, as only time would tell of his improvement.

Man, why couldn't he just be dead?

His parents visited almost everyday, but it was of no reassurance to him. His mother always left in tears, and his father was lost for words. This was nothing new. When it concerned their troubled son, they felt inadequate to help him. The best his dad could say was, "Hey, Chris, we're pullin' for ya". That was of no comfort, whatsoever, like he was some fighter in a boxing ring that his old man had a bet placed on . His mom always clung to him as she said goodbye, like she needed the hug more than he did, saying to Chris through her sobs , "Miss you....love you". Her emotional state just unsettled him to the core, and he was worried for her more than for himself.    

At best, his outlook was grim. But then he met Lacie Weiss, and things started looking up.

Lacie was one of the quietest psych patients in the ward, always sticking to herself. But then he found himself sitting right next to her in group therapy, and they hit it off. He had no idea that she had a fun side. She usually looked apathetic and quietly defiant to society, a nonconformist in the form of a Goth, with edgy, dyed black hair, dark eye make-up and some ****** piercings of the eyebrow, tongue and nose. Her look was quite in contrast to his light blue eyes and sandy-brown hair. Chris never was into Gothic, viewing those who were as spooky creeps.  

It was obvious that Chris was scared and confused. Now although trying to seem tough and stoic, Lacie seemed so little, almost fragile, yet obviously trying to hide her broken self together. Petite and somewhat girlish in appearance, she was barely 5 feet tall. Chris was 5 feet 11 and a half inches, close enough to the six foot stature that he wanted to be. Only a half inch less really didn't cut it for him, though, even though his slim build gave the impression of a lankier guy. He would have loved to be as tall as the basketball players he so emulated. But such was life. He was never used to having the advantages.  

At first, Lacie never opened up, not to a single soul. Like Chris, she certainly acted like she didn't need this place, and nobody was going to help her--or be allowed to help her. As stony and impenetrable as she tried to be, group therapy it was hard to disappear in. Everyone was held accountable for opening up, and the leader was going to see to it.  No way, though, did Lacie want to crack or look weak in her turtle shell composure, in her self-preservation mode. So it was agony for her.

She first spoke to him, whispering loudly to him, onc,e in the group circle "This is all *******!"

Hanging with Chris was the one salvation that she had in this miserable experience. They both could relate more than he ever realized. They both really liked motorcycles and basketball. He had his own Harley, and it was something he loved to work on and go on long rides with it, his own brand of therapy.  In spite of how she looked, Lacie was also actually close to his age. He was twenty-six. and she was twenty-two.

They first broke the ice with casual introductions. "No, the name is not pronounced like Carter", he corrected her about his last name. "It is like Cart-EE-AY...... It's French".

"Yep", she replied. "Like mine is the same way, but as German as brats and sauerkraut,  Ja dummkopf?"

Chris gave her a weird look. She continued, "My mom's dad was from Germany, and I got my mom's name. Ya don't say it how it looks. You would say Weiss like Vice, but I couldn't give a **** how anybody says it. Nobody gets it right and original, anyhow." Her dark brown eyes flashed at him as she said, " But I think I like Chris Cutie, myself, better than Cartier.....cutie it is for me. Huh, cutie pie? "

Chris laughed hard. She was pretty coy for a die-hard Goth. She batted her eyes playfully at him and winked."You're worth being in here for, ya know", he told her, blushing, still laughing at her silly remarks.

She studied his face in response, all laughing aside. Suddenly, her mood turned solemn.  "I'll bet".

They began hanging out in the commons, walking down the halls for exercise, and swapping stories of their plights. Chris quickly found that she Lacie wasn't so steely and unapproachable as the day he first saw her.  And she discovered that he was more than a pretty boy.

"My parents weren't home when I tried", he told her one time after lunch was done. They were sitting in a corner, trying to be as private as possible. "Twenty-six years old...and I still live with them. Yeah, that's my life. I got a twin brother, and he's moved out and doing alright for himself. My sister's younger, is going to college. Wants to be a doctor".

Lacy didn't have any siblings to compare herself to. "Must be cool to have a twin", Lacie said. "I always wondered how that would be to have two of me running around! Scary, huh, dude?"

Chris shook his head. "No, it's nothing like that. Jake and I aren't identical. We are just a two-for-one deal...I mean  is that my parents got two babies in one, huge-*** pregnancy. Jake and me don't even act like twins. Half the time, I don't want to be around him."

No, it wasn't like his cousins, Adam and Alan, who were identical friends, mirror images, and best of friends. Chris never identified with that kind of brotherly relationship. He and Jake never dressed alike, or knew what the other one was thinking. And Chris felt that his brother always felt superior to him. He was the popular one. He was the ambitious one who landed a great job in computers, as a system analyst.  To add to Chris's feelings of inferiority, his little sister, Kate, had surpassed him, too. She was acing most of her classes, and boarding away at college. She was well on her way to becoming a doctor.    

"So if your mom and dad weren't around...who saved you?" Lacie asked. She stared into his eyes with such a probing stare that Chris almost clammed up. Just thinking about that day was overpowering.

"Uh...my sister and her boyfriend were hanging out in the basement. She was home from college, and I didn't know it. My parents were out-of-town. Our dog, Buster, was acting funny. He knew something was up..."

Chris stopped abruptly, but went on. "Kate, my sister, explained to me that she saw me in my room, getting up on a step ladder. She says she yelled at me to stop. I don't remember...but I guess..I guess I was going to do it anyway, and she wouldn't be able to stop me....stop me from...so I hurried up and jumped off before she could stop me."  

Lacie could almost picture it, as if she was there with him. She said, "But she did stop it. She saved you."

"Yeah", he agreed. "Buster started it all...barking, alerting my sister to come upstairs from the basement, and upstairs by my room...." All of a sudden, he felt so weird, like he was having an out-of-body experience.

"Hey, it's OK", Lacie reassured him. "It's over now. You aren't there anymore".

Chris started to cry, but tried not to. "If it weren't for Brian, Kate's boyfriend....she would not of had the strength to hold me up by herself, and cut the rope, too. I must have been like dead weight, and Brian grabbed a kitchen knife and told her to stay cool about it. Yeah, sure, like that could have been possible ! She was trying to keep the rope slack, while trying to save my sorry ****...and she was scared, shitless! "

Lacie opened up, too, relating her tragic past. She had an unbelievable tale, one hell of a ride herself.  It was amazing how detached she was when relating it, though. "Well" actually I got to fess up" "I'm not really an only child....I mean I am...but not really. I know that sounds weird---hey--but I am weird. Oddly unusual is the story of my life-- even before day one. "

Chris had no idea what she was talking about. "What are ya' trying to say?"

She added another surprising bombshell. "Also,  I have a two-year-old boy. His name is Danny. He don't see his dad--ever. The guy's a waste of space. Anyway, my mom has him. She can afford him more, and can do a better job raising him than me. Well, she does OK money-wise. Anyhow, my mom deserves him because she lost everything. And I mean EVERYTHING! Her whole fricking family practically wiped out!"

The shock that Chris had on his face-- his widened, blue eyes and open mouth were expected.   Most people had a hard time believing her.

She explained, calmly, "I mean she nearly died--way before I was born--in a car accident. And her two, little boys were with her in the backseat...and they died that day. "

Chris looked pale. "That is so awful!" he said, hoarsely, barely able to say it.

"Yeah", she continued. "Not a **** thing she could do about it, too. She was like in a million pieces. I know a part of her died right there and then, too. I just know it.  You know, dude, my mom was once really, really coasting along, just doing fine. A typical wife and mother-- a bit older than me now-- life was good. Her little boys were just cute, little toddlers--like Danny. I found out from my grandma that she was  pregnant, too, just a month or two. Nobody could have imagined it coming. She was just driving--doing nothing wrong-- when some idiot broadsided her.  I don't know if it was a guy or a lady, if they were jacked up on ***** or drugs, but they were speeding like a demon out of Hell. Her husband was at work and wasn't around."  

The boys were Benjamin and Gerard, but Lacie couldn't remember their names, for her mom could barely mention them without breaking down. It was an unbearable loss.

Chris was so horrified, amazed that Lacie related this like it was someone else's story. She was almost too cavalier about it.

"And they died ?!" he asked.

"Yeah....*****, don't it? Pure, pure agony. Downright Hell on earth. My mom had to learn to walk again. It took about year, I think."

"Oh, no! What about the baby she was supposed to have?"

"Miscarriage. Worse yet, the **** doctor told her she'd never be able to have kids again. She lost everything, man! Her husband couldn't handle it and left her. **** on top of ****, on top of more ****, on top of more. If it wasn't for her parents, and her sister's help, she would never have made it.

"But she had given birth to you, right? Or were you adopted?"

"Yeah, she gave birth to me. I was her miracle baby, and she didn't give a rat's rear end if my dad wanted me or not. He'd send her money, once in a while, but he wasn't really into either of us. Who cares though? She didn't give a **** what he thought. I was her baby. Truth is, before I came, she ended up slitting her wrists--just like me. What was the use? At first, there was nothing to live for. But now she has Danny.

"And you!" Chris quickly pointed out.

"Dude, are you kidding me? I have been NOTHING but grief for her, a real pain in her ***!"

Unlike her deceased, half-brothers, Lacie grew up before her mother's eyes, from a shy girl to a ******* rebel. Since the age of twelve, she would sneak drinks from her mom's liqueur cabinet. Eventually, she smoked *** and tried ******* and ******. Dropping out of the eleventh grade, she soon away from home, living with friends or boyfriends ever since.  Thankfully, she wasn't doing drugs when she conceived Danny. And her drinking wasn't as prevalent as it was in her teen years of partying and binge drinking. That didn't mean that her drinking problems magically disappeared, or that she was cured. Immediately, though, when she knew she was pregnant, she refused to touch a bottle, but it was just a white knuckle process that was effective momentarily--a band aid on a more serious wound. And going months without a drop of alcohol didn't deaden her urges--quite the opposite--as it only made her crave what she could not have. Often, her fears caught up with her--of especially becoming

I heard faint noises downstairs, and I decided to investigate. I pulled on a pair of cut-off jeans and grabbed the old pump shotgun that had served me so well in Viet-Nam from under my bed and crept downstairs to check. My Ranger training came into play, and I moved soundlessly, down the stairs and into the living room. An air of vague shadowy figures were searching through the cabinet that housed my collection of antique silver. I announced my presence in a sudden and intimidating manner: I merely pumped the action of the shotgun, then immediately moved to the right so if anyone shot, he would shoot where I had been, not where I was now. That sound was a language that everyone understood, including the two figures before me. They froze, and were still motionless.

"Mr. Steve?" one of the figures quavered. "Please don't shoot!"

I recognized the voice as belonging to Lisa, the twenty-year-old daughter of my nearest neighbor. I didn't know who the other person was or who else may be in the house, so I kept the shotgun pointed in their direction and hit the light switch with my free hand. Immediately a car cranked up in my driveway, and tires squealing, raced out to the road and away. I looked at my midnight visitors. I recognized Lisa and Julie, who was a close friend of Lisa's and a frequent overnight visitor of hers. They were holding between them a laundry bag containing most of my silver collection. I lowered the muzzle of the cut down shotgun.

"You sure know how to get yourselves killed," I stated. "Mind telling me who was in the car? You don't want to take the rap all by yourselves."

"Please don't shoot! That was Mike, it was all his idea! He made us do it! He said he would put us out and make us walk home if we didn't do it! Are you going to call the Cops?"

Now I could understand why the girls tried to burglarize my home. It was a fifteen-mile walk home in pitch darkness on a moon-less night for the two frightened girls. It was just what a worthless **** like Mike would pull. Knowing what I did about Lisa's boyfriend, I knew what he probably needed the money for. He was nineteen; the only job he had ever had was selling drugs, and I don't mean at the pharmacy. He was a charmer though. Girls fell for his good looks and his charm, and would do anything for him, and he of course chose the best looking one of the bunch, Lisa. She never realized what a slime-ball he really was. The problem was that Lisa didn't have a father to threaten to put a bullet in Mike's behind, and her mother was just as deceived as she was.

"You broke into my house and attempted to steal my belongings. Why shouldn't I?" I said with false sternness. I wouldn't really turn them in, now that I knew the situation. I would give the girls a good scare, then a ride home. Maybe then Lisa would see through Mike's veneer.

"Because we'll do anything you want," Julie offered, speaking for the first time. "Anything at all!"

Julie stepped over and ran her hand up my leg, pausing to tweak the head of my ****, which was hanging out of the leg of my cutoffs. I hadn't bothered to pull on any underwear. Julie was almost as good looking as Lisa was. Both girls had fabulous bodies, large firm ****, and smooth well-rounded *****. Julie had a cute face, whereas Lisa was absolutely beautiful.

"Yes, anything you want to do!" Lisa agreed.

The girls weren't wanton *****, but scared out of their wits and taking the only way out that they could think of. Of course they weren't virgins. It hadn't occurred to me to take advantage of the girls like this, and I would have declined Julie's offer if she hadn't fooled with my **** like that. You see, I was developing an outrageous *******, and with my **** hanging down the leg of some fairly tight shorts, the situation was rapidly becoming painful and serious. I had to get those pants off fast! Also, I hadn't been laid in quite a while. I decided to lay my cards on the line.

"You kids know me. I never had any intention of calling the Cops. I was going to give you a scare to teach you a lesson, then drive you home. Does that mean the offer is withdrawn?"

The girls looked at each other and both breathed a sigh of relief, big smiles on their faces. Lisa winked at Julie. "Nope," Julie said, smiling, "It still stands. Lets go upstairs."

I escorted the girls to my bedroom, pressed the magazine block on the shotgun, pumped out the shell that was still in the chamber, then put it back in the magazine. I tossed it onto the dresser with a loud thump.

I turned around and both girls were stark naked. Lisa came over, dropped to her knees, and planted a wet kiss on the head of my painfully throbbing ****. My ******* became harder still. I had to get out of those cutoffs! Julie solved that problem. She unzipped and unbuttoned them and gently worked them down around my rock-hard ****, allowing it to spring up to freedom.

"Lets get on the bed first," I suggested, "Then we have fun."

"Lay down on your back," Lisa insisted. "Have we got something for you!"

I complied, and Lisa leaned over and put my **** in her hot mouth. Her tongue swirled over the head, ran up and down the shaft, and started over again. I looked over at Julie and she was watching avidly. Not having anything better to do with my hands, I reached between her legs and caressed her ****. Julie gasped with surprise, then spread her legs. Her **** was already hot and wet, so I slid my ******* in all the way, then started finger ******* her and massaging her **** with my thumb. Her **** hardened and grew. Julie had her eyes closed and was erotically tweaking her ***** *******. She was slowly lowering her body, deepening the ******* of my finger, and rocking her hips back and forth, intensifying the stroking of her ****. Julie's hot ***** juices ran down my hand while Lisa's mouth was still working on my throbbing ****.

I began to draw my hand from Julie's sopping wet ****, but she grabbed it and held it tightly to her crotch. I pulled my hand now, and she came with it. I grabbed her thigh and swung her leg over me, so she was now sitting on my chest. I pulled my finger from her hungry ****, grabbed her ***, and pulled her ****** right up to my face. As soon as I flicked her **** with the tip of my tongue, she went wild, ******* my face, filling my nostrils with the sweet aroma of her **** juices. I thought I would give her all the licking she could handle. I rammed my tongue into her ****-hole with all my might, then gently nibbled on her ****. Apparently she had a low threshold, as this was all she could stand.

"Oh God, I'm coming!" she screamed, ground her **** into my face one more time, quivered, then collapsed sideways onto the bed.

One down, one to go. I looked at Lisa, still ******* my **** for all she was worth. I was nearing the end of my endurance, and I still hadn't had my **** in any hot **** yet. I grabbed Lisa's shoulders and pulled her mouth from my ****. I turned her around and held her up, her blonde ***** triangle just inches over my waiting tool.

"Give it to her! Now!" Julie whispered.

Lisa's **** didn't look wet or ready to take anything in it yet, but my **** was ready to take some *****. Julie reached over and spread the lips to Lisa's still dry *****, and began tweaking her ****. Lisa gasped her surprise at her most private place being touched by another chick. Within seconds though, her **** and inner ***** lips began to swell, and her juices started flowing. I slowly lowered Lisa to my rod, admiring her glistening pinkness. Julie guided my throbbing rod into Lisa's wet love hole.

"Please, be careful! Ah-h-h-h! Go slow, I'm so tight!"

I lowered Lisa very carefully, for her hot ****-hole was indeed the tightest ***** I had ever felt. With that in mind, I fought the urge to slam her down on my eager ****. As soon as she was down, I grabbed her *** and began sliding her back and forth. Lisa bit her lip as a tear trickled down from one eye.

"Stop, Mr. Steve! It's hurting her!" Julie commanded. Then to Lisa, "You haven't done it much, have you?"

"Just once, with Mike, and he isn't this big. It hurt then, too!" Lisa sobbed. "I wanted so bad to do it with Mr. Steve because he's been so nice to me, and I was so scared when I saw how big he was. Oh, it hurts!"

"You'd better get up then." I reassured, "I don't want to do anything to you that you don't want me to do."

"I want to go on, really I do! But don't you have anything I could use to make it easier?"

"Yeah, any Vaseline, or KY jelly, or something like that?" Julie asked.

"I have some KY jelly in the bathroom." I answered.

Julie jumped up and padded into the bathroom. I watched her naked *** jiggle as she left.

"You're gonna have to get up." I told Lisa. I gently lifted her ***. She bit her lip again and moaned as my **** slowly withdrew from her tortured hole. With a pop from her *****, a shriek burst from her lips as my **** sprung from her nearly dry ****-hole. She knelt on the bed next to me, softly crying, clutching herself where it hurt. I realized that she had been wrong in pretending to be so eager. A more gentle approach was needed.

I reached over, pulled her to me, and kissed her lips passionately. She ****** once in surprise, then melted into my arms, returning my kiss, forgetting the pain in her ****. I ran my hand around to her firm **** and gently stroked her *******, feeling them harden under my touch. I pulled my mouth from hers and kissed the point of each hard ******. She moaned and gasped with each touch of my lips, but from pleasure this time, not from pain. While I had her aroused, I lightly traced circles on her tummy with my finger, each circle going lower and lower, until I finally reached the blonde **** of her ***** hair. Slowly, I reached down and cupped her ***** with my hand, being careful not to press too hard or insert my finger. I would know when she was ready for *******. She responded with a **** and a gasp. I pressed again, and she gasped again. I kissed each firm ****** one last time, then started kissing down her tummy to her love nest, which was now warming and starting to respond to my touch.

I spread her legs and gently ran the tip of my tongue the full length of her slit. When I reached the vicinity of her ****, she reacted as though she had been shocked. She arched her back, pressing her **** against my face. Maybe she was ready. I probed again with my tongue, harder this time, hard enough to separate her ****-lips and tickle her ****. She went mad again, jerking and twitching in response to the touch of my tongue, moaning and panting. Then I felt her **** harden, her inner lips swell and spread, and her delicious juices start to flow. Now she was definitely ready for more. I probed her ****-hole with my tongue, licked all the way up to her ****, swirled it around, bit it gently, and then probed her hole again. When I started doing all this, she went even wilder. She spread her legs, ****** and reared against my face, and pulled my head tight against her hot cooze.

"Oh-h-h-h-h, **** me," she moaned, "I can't stand it any more! I don't care if it does hurt! Please, please **** me!"

I put her throbbing **** between my lips and gave it one hard ****, drawing it completely into my mouth, and pulled my head back sharply, causing her **** to pop back. She screamed, ****** her hips at me, and grabbed her sweating *******.

When she had subsided, her legs still spread, I mounted her in the traditional position. I started to position my throbbing pole for a gentle entry, but Lisa released her **** and spread her ****-lips with one hand and guided my tool to her sopping wet ****-hole with the other. She was much wetter now than when Julie diddled her ****, wet enough to ****.

"Please do it now!" Lisa pleaded.

I began to insert my **** cautiously, and found that due to her juices, entry was no problem. Lisa groaned like a ****** as I slid into her hot wetness. When she had taken as much of my ten-inch tool as she could, I still wasn't all the way in. But she began pumping her hips, causing the swollen head of my **** to ram against the back of her *****. She was as deliciously tight as before, but she must have been stretching, for with just a few strokes, my ***** were slapping against her ***, and I was in to the hilt. My tenderness and foreplay had paid off.

"Oh-h-h-h, that's good!" she purred when I began pumping to meet her rhythm. She wrapped her legs around my waist, and was pumping as hard as I was. With each stroke, I would completely withdraw from her hot, tight wetness, then shove my eager tool back in to the hilt, never missing her voracious target, always sliding easily in, jamming against the back of her *****.

Her pumping increased in tempo, and I sped up to match. Each pump became harder and more frantic than the one before. Lisa's breathing became harder and faster. She was about to come, and I wanted to come with her. I raised her legs over my shoulders so that I had a better angle at the depths of her tight hole, and started ramming as hard as I could.

"Don't stop! I think I'm gonna come! Oh-h-h, its so good! Come in me! Oh, please, I want to feel your load in me!" Lisa screamed. She bucked and reared and screamed incoherently, then went limp. I continued to pump. In just a few seconds, she began to pump anew. For more times than I could count, she orgasmed.

Once I felt my ****** approaching, I gave her one last hard ram and drove my weapon in as far as I could. I came at this point, spurting her sweet, tender Steve **** full of my hot sticky come, like an erupting volcano. She gasped, trembled, and fell back to the bed. I pulled out my softening ****. Our ****** energies were spent for the moment.

I glanced down at the foot of the bed, and saw Julie, whom I had forgotten. She sat in the chair at the foot of the bed, her legs spread, working a coke bottle in and out of her *****. She had found the KY jelly, then found us ******* away. Feeling left out but excited by the ****** sight of her best friend getting a good *******, she slicked up the coke bottle and began using it as a *****.

I saw that Lisa also was seeing something she had never seen before, her best friend's ****, gaping open, a coke bottle almost disappearing inside it. "Look how far in she puts it! And see how big it is to go in her like that. How does she do it?" Lisa asked, amazed.

"Why don't you get a closer look," I suggested. "Ask her." Lisa crawled down to the foot of the bed and sat on the end, astounded, watching Julie *******.

Julie finally looked down, under heavy-lidded eyes and saw Lisa so close. "Why don't you do this for me?" Julie asked.

"How?" Lisa queried.

"Just do what I'm doing now," came Julie's reply. Lisa watched for a few seconds more, then pushed Julie's hand aside and grasped the slippery end of the bottle. "In and out, and twist it a little bit. Oh, yes-s-s, oh, yes-s-s. Do it good, oh, that's so good!" Julie purred.

My **** was hardening again at the sight of one female ******* another.

I had an idea. If Julie was as promiscuous as she seemed, she might not object to what I had in mind. While Lisa continued to work the bottle in Julie's stretched ****, I helped Julie out of the chair and down to the floor, her heaving **** on the floor, her *** up in the air. She stayed in the position, crooning wordlessly, **** juice dribbling down her thighs, Lisa still ******* her.

I picked up the tube of KY jelly that Julie had used, and liberally covered my ***** rod with it. Then I stood behind Julie, straddling Lisa.

"What are you going to do?" Lisa asked.

"Watch and see!" I responded. With that I grasped Julie's hips and aimed my **** at the delicate rosette of Julie's ***. Using my **** like a weapon, I suddenly shoved my tool in as far as I could. Julie let out a scream, tearing out fistfuls of carpet.

"Oh God, **** my ***! That hurts so good! **** me harder, give me all you've got! Make it hurt! Give me more of that bottle!"

"I'm ***-******* Julie!" I informed Lisa, who was now completely mind-blown.

I needed no invitation, and neither did Lisa. Both of us gave Julie all we could, Lisa with the bottle in Julie's ****, me with my **** far up Julie's clenching ***. Julie rocked back to take us both in, then forward, then back for more. I couldn't see

Is to be told all the ways you don't matter
It is to be angry and afraid
It is to watch people walk on the opposite side of the street to avoid you
It is to be told to get over slavery
It is to be told that I'm not racist I have black friends
It is to be told the definition of racism like you don't already know
It is to be told hey what about reverse racism
It is to have a white terrorist group dedicated to your elimination
It is to be more worried about threats in your own country and those abroad
It is to wonder daily if your family will be safe, if they will get to come home
It is to called a **** for speaking out against the hate
It is to be called lazy when you work full time to provide for your family
It is to walk past folks and watch as the clench their purse or pockets
It is to be to have people fear you, when you feel more threatened then they ever could
It is to be told that privilege doesn't exist
It is to be told you are equal, except you know that in the courtroom, in the eyes of the law, the job market, the housing market, in the classroom, it is a ****** lie
It is to be live in a world where 1 in 3 black men are in prison
It is to know that they have sentences longer than white counterparts
It is to know they use prison labor to exploit them, slavery living on
It is to know that the police which are a relief for some, are a nightmare for you
It is to know that you can do everything right and be killed by someone sworn to protect you
It is to know that you will be blamed for your death inspite of this
It is to have the life choked out of you and a man telling you, **** your breathe
It is to hear what about black on black crime, even though every race commuts crime against their own kind the most
It is to remember white flight and the repercussions of it
It is to have family who have seen the bloodiness of the covil rights movement
It is to be taught in school how great this country is while ignoring the evil its done
It is to be taught in school how little you meant
It is to wake up every 2 weeks to another hashtag of some poor black fella to be forgot in a week
It is to want to simply be acknowledged that things arent right, and being ignored to this day
It is to be villianized in the media
It is to see that flag everyone holds dear and remember that pain it caused you
It is to fight and die for a country that still doesn't care about you
It is to be told to go back to Africa as if this wasnt stolen land
It is to be told I dont see you as black, you're just the same to me
It is to be told well you don't count as black, you don't act black
It is to have your culture stolen
It is to have value placed on your mysic and style and not your skin
It is to hear what would MLK think about these protest
It is to remember that people celebrated his assassination
It is to remember the slurs and the hate he recieved
It is to have people know they don't want to be treated the way you are
It is to want whats always been denied, the privilege of walking in your own skin without fear of persecution
It is to see family, friends and peers celebrate and share racist ideas and beleifs
It is being reassured they still value you
It is to know but not enough to matter

Being black in America is a lot of things, and I love the country all the same.

But I hope and pray for the day, that we can be treated the same.

Love bears all things
- or does it?
I don't know how much more I can take
- but I love him.
I'm scared and weak
- I don't know where I stand.
Back to the beginning
- all over again.
Tired of being reassured
- I don't want reassurance.
I want to reverse our love's senescence
- Its death won't procure my compliance.

I talk words of lust
with a boy unaware
I know not if it's unjust
if he knew that i would dare

To be touching lips with another
and another after that
3 boys who want me
and on top of that...

an ex-lover who awaits
her love to be reciprocated
by one she had wronged
by me, yes, I she has wronged.

and alas, the sister of a friend
whom i am confused upon
if i should love her or not
fool, you may think that she is the last one

another girl at school
she is but a year older
i see her from time to time
rarely i seek for her

she is but a crush
the sister, but a dream
the ex-lover - such a waste
and though it may seem

that i am an adultress
because of all these men
but judge me not
i don't belong to any of them

commit, you say
it is for the best
but if i do so again
i may have to rip out my chest

it hurts beyond words
and the pain - i may not be able to bare
and i'd have to swallow the hurt again
till i am too numb to give a care

so tell me, kind stranger, what would you do?
if you had 3 boys and 1 girl loving you
another girl, you might love
and another girl, as a crush
don't you think it's a tad bit too much?

though, i can't control it
I need to be reassured
that though my love betrayed me
this broken vessel be cured

by something more real
it has to exist
something i wont be afraid to love
something far greater than a kiss

something others cant take from me
something thats just mine
something that i can have
and keep for all time

so tell me, kind stranger, do you take me for a fool?
you think i don't know that such thing is hard to find?
that it is but impossible
because i am still so blind

i'll find my happiness
i pray to the gods i do
but only once i stop thinking of finding it
is when id find you

you. whom i have poured my heart and soul out to
without giving a rat's ***
one i'm not afraid of - i'm afraid of everything.
you, who is not wearing a mask.

if you tell me that you're right there
id lose all faith in man kind
because i know you're not
i know that now.

if you tell me you wont hurt me
don't say another word
because i know you will hurt me
i know that now.

but i can love myself
i can live for myself, too
i know that now
i don't exactly have to live for you.

it is my life
this is my world
but i'm lonely
because i'm too scared to be that broken hearted girl

the one who cried
the one who swore
and hit her lover
and walked out the door

even if i could
i wouldn't change a thing
because through this mangled heart
i can love true again

someday..

Everyday, hell every minute I get to call him mine
I fall deeper and deeper in love.
I decide that I'm going to give myself to him.
Time doesn't slow down,
And so I decide to follow my heart.
Trusting him with everything.
We pick a playlist, a date, and a time;

Then we make love for the first time.

It was everything I wanted and so much more. His gentle embrace afterwards assured me that I had picked the right guy.
But life happens, and and after a few more times, my parents find out.
Two months.
We had only been dating two months
And what seemed like the end of my world had begun.
Tears fell like snowflakes on a cold December night
I expected him to leave me
But see, this is the first time my luck changed when I needed it too.

He held me through the tears
Picked me up when I was hurt
Reassured me that he would never leave
He was strong for the both of us and made me smile when he could
Possibly the biggest obstacle a high school couple could face was thrown at us early in our relationship
I guess we should've waited.
But I don't regret my actions.
We endured it, grew closer, and loved each other like nothing had changed.

Loving him was the biggest epiphany I've ever had,
I stopped trusting the universe and put some faith in myself
And the ones I loved

The world has been brighter ever since.

Hard months pass.
We attend his Junior Prom
I slow dance for the first time
And the Star Wars series is completed.
Before we realize it, summer is in the air, along with it our half year milestone.
6 months pass with this boy and I feel as if he asked me out just yesterday.
We spend the day together and I thank him for the wonderful date and kiss him goodnight

Under that full moon which has watched my relationships end, he holds me close after our kiss.
With teary eyes he thanks me for the best 6 months of his life.
I hug him teary eyed as well.
I shut my eyes and take the moment in.
His scent, the cold breeze, and the cicadas singing to us in the dark.
If there is a love anymore true than this, please tell me.

I look up at the night sky at the distant worlds and ponder our own
Earth may be my home planet
But I know that I'm holding the other half of my life in my arms.

My parents begin to ease up
Theres talk of college in the air
I start to feel happy once more.

I paint my canvases with bright colors
And begin to stain blank pages with my life story once again.
A new sun is rising.

Reassured by your passion forget all the strife.
Pick up your board and skate away life.

bypassing the 502 error: title - whiplash...
body... cream...

original intent:

they're doing road works on a stretch of road
where the brothel sits:
house of the rising sun or whatever you want
to call it... i'm not ready for the thrist:
for the plunge that will extend into half a decade's
worth of not *******...
i'll give it a week or so... before i take the plunge:
proper... mind you... i've already found
the perfect formula for drinking...
the cheapest bottle of australian wine...
at 14%... mixed into the glorious Mayan drink
of the gods' that's kalimotxo...
and if i'm still not "feeling it": i'll top myself
off with some slender-man's whiskey glug-glug...
it worked so well for 4 years without
touching a woman's body...
what the hell prompted me?
to wake up from this slumber?
oh... right... i own two maine **** cats
and when i was grooming the female...
she stuck up her brunt right into my hands...
it felt like: trans-species ******* for a while...
a cog in my brain went loose...
for days i cycled in the night into central London
looking at the flesh market:
of the free peoples of the western world...
what prompted me...
i was grooming my maine **** cat and she
was tempting me with a: ******* hairy apple...
no... wrong... just plain wrong...
perhaps i swing around beard envy & ha...
***** envy (well... imagine a rabbit ******* an elephant...
big **** genre of: and how deep is that...
ahem... hole? standard kama sutra...
not one size fits all)
but when your cat starts to imitate getting it...
**** me... the night... cycling... sweating it off...
until you have to touch the antonym...
but suppose you come across a timid girl
and you get a case of erectile dysfunction...
while you end up caressing her: timidly kissing
her because she's timid...
pointing at her eyebrows... nose... eyes...
ears... pimples... freckles and moles...
the mirror... fingers... elbow... knees...
and asking her to say the Romanian words for them...
sure... a momentary lapse in sanity:
the reason(s) was already self-evident...
take a woman like Ava Lauren...
now... my god... by god... that's a ****-machine...
an *** like a Lamborghini and a body
like a leather armchair...
and she stuck through it... a mandible body
of the extension of the jaw...
some people are born to be boxers...
she was built to be ****** in the confines of
orthodoxy...
dead pornstars though... i.e. Shyla Stylez...
it's really a joke if i ask: would it be necrophilia
if i'm doing it to images of a dead pornstar?
"doing it": best on the toilet...
no... no scented candles... no eager kangaroo *****
no webcam... no thrill...
3 birds:  1 stone: on throne of thrones...
no better way and all the best excuses to later
jump under the shower and get on with the dead...
sorry.. day...
4 years i did... grooming a cat awoke in my a thirst
i thought i had long forgotten...
- kinks: mostly foreplay...
       kissing after all that 2nd base foreplay
while she's on top of you veiling you with her
Turkic raven hair...
immediately after the act: all that virility...
now... dilution...
            kinks: i still tend to rub my hands against
a brick wall before i enter their abode...
i rub my hands against bricks
to demand more from when i'm touching
flesh... nothing can come close when standing
at the altar of a woman's naked body
in dim lighting... with at least 2 mirrors on the wall...
reassurances of cleanliness are highly
welcome... even though by a tonne load of surprises
she would perform ******* with the rubber
commoner of promiscuity...
- kinks: any body attired in latex...
  that's the height: ms. gimp...
                          well... there's that or me endowed
with a cockerel sized endowment about
to **** a maine **** cat during grooming...
as "sick" as finding out you've been doing
the nos. 1, 2 & 3 on the throne of thrones
to a dead pornstar like Shyla Stylez...
in third person: lover-boy all smooches
and octopus tentacles reading the geography
like he might pick up the braille of all the grooves
and hinges...
interruption: i'm no pornographer!
although there's this one allusion:
    Venus in Furs... ol' Leo von Sacher-Masoch...
on the tip of my tongue:
at the tip of my fingers...
to turn stone in skin...
   - i remember being in a strip-club once...
i had to fly to Athens for that one...
i walked into a market sq. and met up with
some random... Greeks... Algerians...
Medi- olive skinned folk...
complete strangers... we drifted around the nightclubs
and watched the girls coming out...
how's that scale of nought through to ten?
below average... and highly demanding...
the four of us decided: **** it...
we climbed into a car and drove to the outskirts
of Athens to a strip-club...
unlike a dog that's chasing cars
i couldn't just... look... a few drinks down
and still eyeing the prize
i had two women around my arms
and my face buried in one's *****:
while some demon-she look on from
the other side of the platform of lost clothing...
another put a green peg on the table
informing me i could have more...
by then i was out of debit... my card was
returned... a bouncer escorted me to the nearest
cash machine in a hotel... started talking
to the receptionist while i was pretending to
withdraw money i didn't have...
right there and then i became a child:
******* my clothes... excitement, fear... both...
dunno... drunks have this build in GPS...
Athens... a city i only just arrived in...
blind drunk mad with love...
i managed to find my way back to the hostel...
**** the guiding beacons into my dreams...
eh... a ******* is never going to be a brothel...

i don't like the argument of:
look... but don't touch... touch... but don't taste...
taste but don't... what comes after taste?
if ever i catch myself watching pornogrpahy
it has to be classic Italian flicks...
on silent...
i can never be fully absorbed:
i'll wait for a real experience to come
with the flood of the senses...
i can't give myself to simulation with all
the sense...
after all... i was probably one of the last
boys who bought a ***** mag in a shop
with... actual expedience of trade...
it was still in the open...
i might have died of shame but at least
i didn't hide it...

                  no shame in Belgium though...
we were visiting world war I graveyards
and the trenches... but at the same time
we were looking for the best brothel in Ypres
while i was the only boy buying a ***** mag...
all ****... shaved... unshaved...
no *******: because a man's imagination
was still fertile... you had a woman's body
impose itself on your psyche like
an x-ray... and you had all that imagination
to subsequently have to swallow...
third party ***** weren't involved:
you never felt like a cul de sac ******...
oddly enough... limp **** hey presto:
can't perform when asked...

ooh... ol' Turkic raven hair:
all her talents in the foreplay...
and all the smooching during *******...
thank god i could never marry...
father children...

4 years it has taken me to wake up to this...
"repressed" reality...
repressed or... even the Teutonic Order
had a brothel in their capital-citadel of Malbork...
Marienburg...
for the love of women who also love:
cleanliness... and the aesthetics of arousal...
for all that's love and all that's not love...
for all that beside love: intimacy without question:
but all the answers...
for two bodies imitating slugs or serpents
where no words are exchanged or given
toward *******: autonomous bodies reaching
for braille with eyes wide open...

- the road to the brothel was closed...
the guys doing the road works cut it off...
not tonight... tonight i'm going to bemoan how:
well... when you start writing...
don't expect to have the same sort of privacy rules
implicit of... whatever the hell you do besides...
why wouldn't a plumber raise these words
from the domain of thought that's probably
his most cherished freedom?
people can still pretend to hide in anonymity
on the internet...
but... why would you... write bogus comments
and troll...
before words become carbon on paper: pencil...
the circus of thinking ought to be enough...
unless: like me... you're going at it like a bull...
i don't think i can have "privacy" anymore...
not that that bothers me...
i'll wear a mask when i put my face on...
but literacy so squandered for the upper-hand
in slighting someone anonymously...

                    ha!           someone would have
written a confession: Anne Sexton brush-up on:
what's important... Anne Sexton... now there was
a ***** that if she was willing could make you
dream all day and night...

why are so many pornstars so... ******* attractive
that you'd wish to push them
into bird-cages with the parrots
or adorn them with white linen niqabs?
as much as i want:
my words are not sacrosanct:
but they're also no Mammon slot-machine
golden-goose mine: perhaps when i'm dead:
something might trickle down into the coffers...
but i doubt that...
words never become shapes or colours
or therefore paintings...
words burn... words and all that becomes
collateral as they dig and drown into
the unconscious: of course... no motive...
just a motif...
    
brother Balaam: fellow diviner of the god
of the Hebrews...
brother Balaam... give me the strength of purpose
to chase more shadows: more more more!
speak to me from under the depths
of the sea of death...
they have left these northern lands...
and as they now stand: proud in their multitude:
and still persist in their clinging to the diaspora:
for i will not glutton myself over
the accomplishments of but one Hebrew:
when i can glorify their deity!

literacy has been squandered:
best strip these people of their "knowledge"
of letters: letter by letter:
let them return to smearing **** on cavern ceilings!
hostile barbarians: paradoxically:
the Vikings were renowned in their celebration
of "effeminate" males: poets...
i could warn a dog or two to bark as i thus:
howl...
               little creatures of dispute...
little belittling lords of shovel ****!
hey! prompt! all verb no noun...
something these leeches might understand... "might"...

all this lubricated tongue has made me think
of something else that happened today...
beside me revisiting the cinema of memory...
grandfather and i: the hyenas of the graveyard:
although even he pronounced that
he was unable to laugh: i guess i started to laugh
for the both of us... eagerly, proper:
with the vowel catcher of the first
arm of the tetragrammaton: HA HA...
while the "other" vowel catcher would
smother the vowels in sighs: AH AH!
exasperated... almost...

       call it PR or whatever you want to call it:
i'd rather stack shelves in a supermarket
than work at a call-centre...
the deceit and the Peter Pan *******
i said: it's not the Shetland Islands...
it's the South East...
i was rummaging on an internet speed
of... 0.1Mbps (megabytes per second)
for a while... i reached a zenith of 0.6 - 0.8(Mbps)...

for a year... if not longer...
and there she was: she came...
this bleached-blonde pchła of a... she did put on just
enough mascara...
obviously taken...
i don't think *** entered my thoughts
when... she... didn't... parade her keychain
that involved a picture of her and her child...
pchła: an endearing term for a girl
of timid build... a body my shadow at noon
could break like a walnut...
i called her an engineer...
she wasn't going to construct a bridge...
she was going to fiddle with my router...
my internet connection...
a woman who had desire for fiddling with:
"dead" things: shadows...
arteries... veins... a concept of a heartbeat...

i just admired her hair...
obviously not natural... bleached...
     she was a body occupying a space...
a welcome intrusion nonetheless...
i sort of enjoyed the silence i surrounded her with...
"sort of": i clearly did...
best be on your way...
a female engineer...
well... from 0.1Mbps... coming up for air
now standing at... 5.6Mbps...
she asked: how did "we" manage?
we just watched a lot of the show live...
but... there were more important things to mind...

the bothersome truth is that:
you can't exactly dig into: pristine good...
this girl who became a "cable guy" engineer...
engineer: "engineer": "tech. support":
i'm not trying to demean her purpose:
i'm the one doodling words on a makeshift
canvas...
i'm no painter or mind having
enough nepotistic authority of: father painter
so i become a fashion designer... etc.

i pin-pointed the proper term though: no?
nepotism?
you just can't objectify certain women...
both of us beguiled having internet providers:
so... shouldn't they penalize the companies
that are all software and bar users?
will the software providers turn off my...
electricity?
the PR Peter Pan stunts... as i told her:
you being the engineer and me being the customer...
we can talk... face to face...
but over the phone?
put me in a confessional booth
with a woman from Mecca and her... double take
on what's to be seen: what's to be heard...
what's to be ******... what's not to be seen / heard...
eaten...

an eager *****: if a ***** is going to give...
but if... she's... this occupied presence...
it's impossible to penetrate her with words...
all i have is:
bleached blonde hair...
heavy mascara... something insinuating combating
nervousness: i am what i am: sorting out cables:
i reassured her: the aesthetics will be dealt with...
a drowning man will cling to a razor's edge to save
himself...
why do i feel so hardly alone
around people who invest so much
in... having children?
it's not like i'm expecting 3rd party sources
to come and salvage me: when completely decrepit...

a woman completely devoid of any ****** advances:
perhaps performing the role of a dentist:
a surgeon: it's already exploited by me
when it comes to: seeing her most ******
parts: her hands... at the grace of a supermarket cashier...
let her be... she's already averting her eyes:
i might insinuate a receding question:
there's the moon... the forest...
come autumn...
maybe i'm focusing on exaggerating myself...
i am: exaggerating myself...

toward a focus of timidity...
as best i can...
    i am a dead end joy-**** at best...
an underperformer at least...
              my own very self worn down
skipping barefoot in memory
right now probably better adorned by a straightjacket...
but who's fooling who...
the readied ***** or this girl working out
cables?

i can respect this one without a need
to pressurise her with a... ******* niqab...
until she might bloat over:
over-suckled... fat... nothing more than
a speed machine for *****-count...
something that doesn't deserve limbs:
is all torso and belongs
to the cult of the bone tomahawk cannibals...

that one motto cited by all Arabs
and pseudo-Arabs: there no water in the desert...
spoken in dearest of the dear that's England:
this green and pleasant land...
where's the ******* desert?!
shovel! both a verb and a noun...
how rare.... perhaps not so much...
        proverbs from the Middle East...
******* to the Middle East and let me
riddle my own: better a sparrow in your
hand than a dove on your roof...
how's that?

better joy in the immediacy of your own:
than peace among your closely associated.
******* H'arab...
you're no Jew... esp. when sitting
on Dino-Lamborghini juice...

castles in the sky: so the psychiatrists says...
or cities built on sand...
every Pakistani / Bangladeshi knows this
proverb...
the times of appeasing the "forever" sober
Arab and his sober-Arab libido...
i'll wait... are now... like i once said:
the horrible has already ah-happened...

and if it hasn't: then i'm still... pretty much
taking a proper role in being the only watchman
on a sly of a kipper...
n'est ce pas?

irritation culminates with:
when you make your own wine...
but don't have the filter equipment...
all that excess "fibre" probably gets your more
drunk than expected...

i haven't had enough to my liking to
somehow dissolve the pledge
to keep at least 72 ****** on a leash...
all that's eternity: given all that's
available and will be:
within the confines of un-chartered space...
send me a postcard from the eye of Jupiter...
i'm more than asking:
imploring: i'm... sort of making:
chain you to me: demands...

tomorrow's a sober head:
tonight... i'll be drunk with both wine
of my own making and...
the memory of a naked body of a woman...
exactly: if she's an engineer: "engineer"
fiddling with my phone socket...
she has a photograph of her and her child
on her keychain...
i wouldn't even dream of...
usurping her... status...

            looking at her felt like eating...
oats... something wholesome...
i met up with you... herr grey...
i did't find any child-fiddling bits...
what... were... you... hiding?!
i will laugh: if you tell me: a heart...
melt my stony enclave...
burn the whole world while you're at it!
there was never going to be any sacrifice
in the crucifix pose:
only purpose for focus: for... submission...
as someone devoid of wanting to continue....
he didn't die for "our" sins...
he died in order to be worshipped...
**** him... let him hang on... father of proselytes...

- point of closure...
for now... i never rose high enough
to suddenly turn cold-turkey: goosebumps
on the *******... still... dead...
i wasn't born into a Buddhist harem...
therefore i sometimes relapse into
the gimmick of the tease...
periodically... every half a decade....
i drink unfiltered self-made wine
and talk about hardly the ******
"exploits":
i come across magnets equivalent to
timid schoolgirls...

some supposed ****** revolution happned:
lob-sided...
given how the girls took the strap-on off
and shoved the **** down
the ******* brains of their bank account
squadron...
     the ******: "******" revolution came out
***-****-side first: thirst:
lopsided: the girls have all their fun...
we die... they come close to old age:
it continues: men tend to think throughout:
that period of concern: supposedly-deemed:
life...

the feminine agony of old age...
grandma's apple pie: **** grandma's apple pie!
i want to drink my wine
with... blisters and...
dis-ingestion...
              
         sucker punch:
            suckle toward a knuckle that might just...
make creases with caresses.

It was the summer of 1954. David Ito was from the only Japanese family we had in our town. I was glad he was my best friend. Actually, he was my only friend. His father moved his family to our small town of Prichard, Illinois when David was only eight years old. That was three years ago.

Only two and a half months apart, I was the older one of our daring duo. I even was a couple inches taller than David was, so that settled it. In spite of being an awkward girl, our differences in age and height made me quite superior at times, although David always snickered at that notion. To me, theses differences were huge and monumental, like the distance of the sun from the moon. To David, that was typical girlish nonsense. He thought it was so like a girl, to try to outdo a boy.  And he should have known. He was the only son of five children, and he was the oldest.

At first, David was not interested in being friends with a girl. But I was Josephine Dunn, Josie they called me, and I was not just any girl. Yet, like David, I did not know if I really liked him enough to be his friend. We started off with this one thing in common.

I knew he was smarter than anybody I ever knew, that is except for my father, a self-taught man. The tomboy that I was, I was not so interested in books and maps, and David was almost obsessed with them. Yet, there was a kindred spirit that ignited us to become close, something coming in between two misfits to make a good match. David was obviously so different from the rest. He came from an entirely different culture, looking so out-of-the-ordinary than the typical face of our Anglo-Saxon, Protestant community, and me, never really fitting in with any group of peers in school, I liked him.

David knew he did not fully fit in. I surely did not fit, either. My brother, Carl, made sure very early on in my life that I was to be aware of one thing. And that one thing was that I did not belong in my family, or really anywhere in life. Mostly, this was because I was not of my father’s first family, but I came after my father’s other children and was the baby, the apple of my father’s eye. But that wasn’t the real reason why Carl hated me.

During World War Two, my father enlisted in the army. He already had two small sons and a daughter to look after, and they already had suffered one major blow in their young lives. They had lost their mother to cancer. Louise Dunn was an important figure in their lives. She was well liked in town and very much missed by her family and friends.
  
Why their father wanted to leave his children behind, possibly fatherless, made no sense to other people. But Jim Dunn came from a proud military family and would not listen to anyone telling him not to fight but rather to stay home with his children. His father fought in the First World War, and three of his great grandfathers fought for the Union Army in the Civil War. It was not like my father to back out of a fight, not one with great principles.  My father was no coward.

Not only did my father leave three small children back home, but a new, young wife. Two years before World War Two ended, he made it back home to his lovely, young wife and family. Back in France, my father was wounded in his right leg. The result of the wound caused my father to forever walk with a limp and the assistance of a cane. It was actually a blessing in disguise what would transpire. He could have easily came home in a pine box. He was thankful, though, that he came away with his life. After recovering for a few months in a French hospital, my father was eager to go home to his family. At least he was able to walk, and to walk away alive.

This lovely, young woman who was waiting for him at home was twenty-year-old Flora Laurent, now Flora Dunn, my mother, and she was eleven years younger than my father. All soldiers were certainly eager to get home to their loved ones. My father was one of thousands who was thrilled to be back on American soil, but his thrill was about to dampen. Once my father laid eyes on his wife again, there was no hiding her highly expanding belly and the overall weight gain showed in her lovely, plump face. She had no excuses for her husband, or any made-up stories to tell him, and there really nothing for her to say to explain why she was in this condition. Simply put, she was lonely.

Most men would have left such a situation, would have gone as far away from it as they possibly could have. Being too ashamed and resentful to stay, they would have washed their hands of her in a heartbeat. Having a cheating wife and an unwanted child on their hands to raise would be too much to bear. Any man, in his right mind, would say that was asking for way too much trouble.  Most men would have divorced someone like my mother, kicked her out, and especially they would hate the child she would be soon be giving birth to, but not my father. He always stood against the grain.

Not only did Jim Dunn forgive his young wife, he took me under his wing like I was his very own. Once I knew he was not my true father, I could never fully fathom why he was not ready to pack me off to an orphanage or dump me off somewhere far away. Why he was so forgiving and accepting made him more than a war hero. It made him my hero. That was why I loved him so much, especially because, soon after I was born, my mother was out of our lives. Perhaps, such a young woman should not be raising three step children and a newborn baby.

My father never mentioned any of the details of my conception, but he simply did his best to love me. He was a tall, very slim and a quiet man by nature. With light brown hair, grey eyes, and a kind face, he looked every bit of the hero I saw him as. He was willing to help anyone in a pinch, and most people who knew him respected him. Nobody in town ever talked about this situation to my father. To begin with, my father was not a talker, and he probably thought if he did talk about it, the pain and shame of it would not go away.

One of my brothers, Nathan, and my sister, Ann, seemed to treat me like a regular sister. Yet, Carl, the oldest child, hated me from the start. As a girl who was six years younger, I never understood why. He was the golden boy, with keen blue eyes and golden, wavy hair, as were Nathan and Ann.  I had long, dark brown hair, which I kept in two braids, with plenty of unsightly brown freckles, and very dark, brown eyes.  Compared to my sister, who was five years older, I never felt like I was a great beauty.

I was pretty young when Carl blurted out to me in anger, “Your mother is a *****!”  I cried a bit, wiped away the tears with my small hands and yelled back, “No, she isn’t!” Of course, I was too young to know what that word meant. When my brother followed that statement up with, “and you are a *******”, I ran straight to my father. I was almost seven years old.

My father scolded Carl pretty badly that day. Carl would not speak to me for months, and that was fine with me. That evening my father sat me upon my knee. “Daddy, what is a *****?” I asked him.

My father gently put his fingers up to my lips to shush me up. He then went into his wallet and showed me a weathered black-and-white photo he had of himself with his arms around my mother. It was in that wallet for some time, and he pulled out the wrinkled thing and placed it in front of me.

My father must have handled that picture a thousand times. Even with all the bad quality, with the wrinkles, I could see a lovely, young lady, with light eyes and dark hair, smiling as she was in the arms of her protector. My father looked proud in the photograph.

He said to me, his expression serious, “whatever Carl or anybody says about your mother, she will always be your mother and I love her for that”. I looked earnestly in his somber, grey eyes. “Why did she go away?” I asked him.

My father thought long and hard about how to answer me. He replied, “I don’t know. She was young and had more dreams in her than this town could hold for her”. He smiled awkwardly and added, “But at least she left me the best gift I could have—you.”  

I would never forget the warmth I felt with my father during that conversation. Certainly, I would never forget Carl’s cruel words, or sometimes the odd glances on the faces of townswomen, like they were studying me, comparing me to how I looked next to my father, or their whispers as the whole family would be out in town for an occasion. It did not happen every day, but this would happen whenever and wherever, when a couple of busybodies would pass me and my father walking down Main Street, or when we went into the ice cream parlor, or when I went with my father to the dime store, and it always made me feel very strange and vaguely sad, like I had no real reason to be sad but was anyway.


- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -


That summer of 1954, I was a bit older, maybe a bit wiser than when Carl first insulted my estranged mother. I was eleven years old, and David was my equal, my sidekick. Feeling less like a kid, I tried not to boss him too much, and he tried not to be too smart in front of me. I held my own, though, had my own intelligence, but my smarts were more like street smarts. After all, I had Carl to deal with.

David seemed destined for something better in life. My life seemed like it would always be the same, like my feet were planted in heavy mud. David and I would talk about the places we would loved go to, but David would mark them on a map and track them out like his plans would really come to fruition. I never liked to dream that big. Sure, I would love to go somewhere exciting, somewhere where I’d never have to see Carl again, or some of the kids at school, but I knew why I had a reason to stay. I respected my father. That is why I did not wish to leave. And David respected his father. That is why he knew he had to leave.

David Ito’s father was a tailor. David’s parents came from Japan, and they hoped for a good life in their new country. Little did they know what would be in store for them. After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, their lives, with many other Japanese Americans, were soon turned upside down. David was born in an internment camp designed to isolate Japanese people from the nation once Americans declared war on Germany and their allies. David and I were both born in 1943, and since the war ended two years later, David had no memories of the internment camp experience. Even so, David was impacted by it, because the memories haunted his parents.

There was no getting around it. David and I, as different as we were, liked each other. Still, neither he nor I felt any silly kind of puppy love attraction. David had still thought of girls as mushy and silly, and that is why he liked me. I was not mushy or silly, and I could shoot a sling shot better than he did. David loved the sling shot his parents bought him for his last birthday. They allowed him to have it just as long as he never shot it at anyone.

David Ito, being the oldest child in his family, and the only son, allowed him to feel quite special, a very prized boy for just that reason. Mr. Ito worked two jobs to support his family, and Mrs. Ito took in laundry and cooked for the locals who could not cook their own meals. Mrs. Ito was an excellent cook. Whatever they had to give their children, David was first in line to receive it.

The majority of those in my town of Prichard respected Mr. Ito, at least those who did business with him. He was not only able to get good tailoring business in town, but some of the neighboring towns gave him a bit of work, too. When he was not working in the textile factory, Mr. Ito was busy with his measuring tape and sewing machine.  

Even though Mr. Ito gained the respect of the townspeople, he still was not one of us. I am sure he knew it, too. Yet Mr. Ito lived in America most of his life. He was only nine-years-old when his parents came here with their children. Like David, Mr. Ito certainly knew he was Japanese. The mirror told him that every day. But he also knew felt an internal tug-of war that America was his country more than Japan was, even when he was proud of his roots, even though he was once locked up in that camp, and even when some people felt that he did not belong here.

If David was called an unkind name, I felt it insulted, too, for our friendship meant that much to me. How many times I got in trouble for fighting at school! My father would be called into the principal’s office, and I was asked by Mr. Murray to explain why I would act in such an undignified way. “They called David a ***** ***”, I exclaimed. “David is my friend!”

Because David and I were best buddies, we heard lots of jeering remarks. “Josie loves a ***! Josie loves a ***!” some of the children taunted. And Carl, with his meanness, loved to be head of the line to pick on us. He once said to me, “It figures that the only friend you can get is a scrawny ***!”

In spite of my troubles at school, Father greatly admired David and his father, and he thought that David and I were good for each other’s company. Mr. Ito greatly respected my father, in return, not only for his business but because my dad could fix any car with just about any problem. Jim Dunn was not only a brilliant man, in my eyes, but the best mechanic in town. When Mr. Ito needed work done on his car, my father was right there for him. It was an even exchange of paid work and admiration.

Both my father and David’s father felt our relationship was harmless. After all, everyone in David’s family knew and expected that he would marry a nice Japanese girl. There was no question about it. Where he would find one was not too important for a boy of his age. Neither of us experienced puberty yet and, under the watchful eye of my father, we would just be the best of buddies.

David pretended like the remarks said about him never bothered him, but I knew differently. I knew he hated Carl, and we avoided him as much as possible. David was nothing like me in this respect—he was not a fighter. Truly, he did not have a fighting bone in his body, not one that picked up a sword to stab it in the heart of someone else. It was not that David was not brave, for he was, but he knew the ugliness of war without ever even having to go to battle. Nevertheless, he used his intellect to fight off any of the racist remarks made about him or his family. He had to face it—the war had only ended nine years prior and a few of the war veterans in town fought in the Pacific.      

Because of the taunts David had experienced in school, I was not surprised what David’s father had in store for his beloved son.  Mr. Ito could barely afford to send one child to private school, but he was about to send one. David was about to be that child. When David told me that when school resumed he would be going to a boy’s school in Chicago, my heart sank. Why? Why did he have to go? I would never see him again!

“You will see me in the summer”, he reassured me. He looked at me as I tried to appear brave. I sat cross-legged on the grass and stared straight ahead like I never even heard him. I had a lump in my throat the size of a grapefruit, and my lips felt like they were quivering.

We were both using old pop bottles for target practice. They sat in a row on an old tree stump shining in the evening sun. David was shooting at them with his prized slingshot. I had a makeshift one that I created out of a tree branch and a rubber band.

“You won’t even remember me”, I complained.

“I will to”, he insisted. “I remember everything.”

“Oh, sure you will”, I said sarcastically. “You’ll be super duper smart and I will just be a dummy”. In anger, I rose up my slingshot, and I hit all three bottles, one by one, then I threw the slingshot to the ground. David missed all the shots he took earlier.

David threw his slingshot down, too. “For being a girl, you are pretty smart!” he shouted. “You are too smart for your own good! The reason I like you is because you are better than anyone I ever met in my entire life. Well…not better than my parents, but you are the neatest girl I ever knew in my life!”

For a while, we didn’t talk. We just sat there and let the warm, summer breeze do our talking for us. I pulle

It was so cold. Snow fell constantly, and ice formed over all the waters. The animals had never seen snow before. At first, it was a novelty, something to play in. But the cold increased tenfold, and they began to worry. The little animals were being buried in the snow drifts and the larger animals could hardly walk because the snow was so deep. Soon, all would perish if something were not done.

"We must send a messenger to Kijiamuh Ka'ong, the Creator Who Creates By Thinking What Will Be," said Wise Owl. "We must ask him to think the world warm again so that Spirit Snow will leave us in peace."

The animals were pleased with this plan. They began to debate among themselves, trying to decide who to send up to the Creator. Wise Owl could not see well during the daylight, so he could not go. Coyote was easily distracted and like playing tricks, so he could not be trusted. Turtle was steady and stable, but he crawled too slowly. Finally, Rainbow Crow, the most beautiful of all the birds with shimmering feathers of rainbow hues and an enchanting singing voice, was chosen to go to Kijiamuh Ka'ong.

It was an arduous journey, three days up and up into the heavens, passed the trees and clouds, beyond the sun and the moon, and even above all the stars. He was buffeted by winds and had no place to rest, but he carried bravely on until he reached Heaven. When Rainbow Crow reached the Holy Place, he called out to the Creator, but received no answer. The Creator was too busy thinking up what would be to notice even the most beautiful of birds. So Rainbow Crow began to sing his most beautiful song.

The Creator was drawn from his thoughts by the lovely sound, and came to see which bird was making it. He greeted Rainbow Crow kindly and asked what gift he could give the noble bird in exchange for his song. Rainbow Crow asked the Creator to un-think the snow, so that the animals of Earth would not be buried and freeze to death. But the Creator told Rainbow Crow that the snow and the ice had spirits of their own and could not be destroyed.

"What shall we do then?" asked the Rainbow Crow. "We will all freeze or smother under the snow."

"You will not freeze," the Creator reassured him, "For I will think of Fire, something that will warm all creatures during the cold times."

The Creator stuck a stick into the blazing hot sun. The end blazed with a bright, glowing fire which burned brightly and gave off heat. "This is Fire," he told Rainbow Crow, handing him the cool end of the stick. "You must hurry to Earth as fast as you can fly before the stick burns up."

Rainbow Crow nodded his thanks to the Creator and flew as fast as he could go. It was a three-day trip to Heaven, and he was worried that the Fire would burn out before he reached the Earth. The stick was large and heavy, but the fire kept Rainbow Crow warm as he descended from Heaven down to the bright path of the stars. Then the Fire grew hot as it came closer to Rainbow Crows feathers. As he flew passed the Sun, his tail caught on fire, turning the shimmering beautiful feathers black. By the time he flew passed the Moon, his whole body was black with soot from the hot Fire. When he plunged into the Sky and flew through the clouds, the smoke got into his throat, strangling his beautiful singing voice.

By the time Rainbow Crow landed among the freezing-cold animals of Earth, he was black as tar and could only Caw instead of sing. He delivered the fire to the animals, and they melted the snow and warmed themselves, rescuing the littlest animals from the snow drifts where they lay buried.

It was a time of rejoicing, for Tindeh - Fire - had come to Earth. But Rainbow Crow sat apart, saddened by his dull, ugly feathers and his rasping voice. Then he felt the touch of wind on his face. He looked up and saw the Creator Who Creates By Thinking What Will Be walking toward him.

"Do not be sad, Rainbow Crow," the Creator said. "All animals will honor you for the sacrifice you made for them. And when the people come, they will not hunt you, for I have made your flesh taste of smoke so that it is no good to eat and your black feathers and hoarse voice will prevent man from putting you into a cage to sing for him. You will be free."

Then the Creator pointed to Rainbow Crow's black feathers. Before his eyes, Rainbow Crow saw the dull feathers become shiny and inside each one, he could see all the colors of the rainbow. "This will remind everyone who sees you of the service you have been to your people," he said, "and the sacrifice you made that saved them all."

And so shall it ever be.
~ Lenni Lenape Tribe

Teetering on her baby legs
A newborn with a Solo cup
bombastic red with a few
undulating ribs
Held firmly in her hand
Is this her first or her third?
Somnambulant yet eager
And just a little out of place
In a foreign territory
On newly contested lands
She stumbles through a raucous crowd
Or was it just white noise?
She’s lost her companions
Somewhere
Although they could very well be close at hand

In the distance she can make out
Laughing faces
Bodies moving to and fro
Spilling forward, little messes
Throwing back cheap libation

She passes through a room and out the door
Into the out-of-doors
Someone following her unbeknownst
Watching her cautious, curious steps
And when she turns and sees the blur standing
She greets it
“Hail Fellow!”

Bouncing from variable to variable
Frequency to frequency
Confident and in command
Of a seemingly controlled chaos
He approaches smiling and holds out his hand
Anonymous

Having drawn her attention from the stars
That she could not find above
Leaning against the garage’s eastern wall
She takes it awkwardly
Tentative she smiles back reassured
Wobbling she returns standing alongside him
Or was she in front?
Purposeful and en route
Emboldened by his presence
And how the way was parted before her
Just by his being there.
By being so close.
She felt vaguely special
it showed in her half-smile
Cloaked in bangs
She held her head just a little bit higher

The co-conspiratorial glances
Met by boys eyes
And shes
Went unseen by the girl with the
Solo cup
One of tens upon tens upon tens
A coven would have known
It’s better not to

However.

She was shown a seat to rest
And her cup refilled
She takes a sip and smiles again
She takes another and then a gulp
That spills
He takes the cup away
And places it on the low table
Suggests she go to the restroom upstairs and get herself
Sorted

Embarrassed she is relieved for direction
Someone knows what’s going on
And his caring
Taking the time
His kind eyes
She’s usually alone
She waddles up the stairs to find
a toilet and a mirror
God she thinks
I look a mess
She tries to fix it
The hair
The eyes
The lips
The dress
The stomach
The *******
The thighs

She shrugs her shoulders at her reflection
Exhales and steps out again
To find him standing there
waiting for more.

She wants another cup.
She’s missing her cup.
I’ll get you the cup he says
In just a second.
Come.

Next lifetime just let me be,
All lost souls that noticed me,
Over killed the hope in me,
Helpful hands unnoticed, feet,
Blistering I’m growing weak.
I have questions for the runaways,
How did your feet get so strong?
Why couldn’t I tag along?
Did you leave home to be alone or vice versa, got cold and was searching for warmer days in the week?
What is life without a friend dependent on I,
Is trust nonexistent when there’s a mention of side,
Is it not selfish to love yourself before mind,
A system that houses a light linked throughout time,
“-What do you want?”
For you to love me like you love all.
Look in the mirror, what about this person,
“I’m always here, all you have to do is call”
Where’s the assertion? I’m looking for words because the ones I’m using aren’t working.
Never felt too good in crowds, because there’s folks around, and they’re always thinking,
Never felt too good or proud, when joyful sounds touch my heart before they’re leaving,
“-Loving others isn’t a bad thing, lose the fear, it’s a state of being.
Don’t hate yourself for seeing a reality that others aren’t capable of seeing.”
But, Am I dreaming?
“Do not confuse yourself, you don’t want to lose yourself for dreams are other realities, you are currently in a state of being.”
But what is being?
“To be or not to be is the question.”
… Give me clarity
“Everything is being, it’s all existing, everything existing is living.”
Is this another lesson?
“Is death to exist and not be, or to be and not exist?
That is my suggestion-”
-How can you be and not exist?
“To exist is to have objective reality, a reality that exist independent from our minds.
Consciousness construct realities through imagination in space, which is time,
So, does the world end when we die,
Or does the experience of this reality end and our consciousness move into another reality beyond the human mind?
Would the state of being then not exist after existences?”
Let me go the distance with an analogy to make sure there’s nothing I’m missing.
Is it pain to love in a world that perceive it with ignorance, or to fully understand it and not have the experience?
“A little personal but the balance is understood.”
I just needed some clarity to be reassured,
Because sometimes I’m insecure,
There’s never been a life that’s “similar”,
And I see things in my life that will occur,
Pretty lady, baby don’t you close the door,
With other opportunities of loving me more,
Arkyi, Dondaycee, keep my knees from the ground,
In times I forget to stand, and am feeling less than a man should when his woman’s aroused,
By another… that feeling’s profound.
“-Jealousy found, that energy is not allowed when there’s confusion around.”
Where’s that soothing sound that moved me in dreams,
That had me chasing angels confusing chicken with wings,
Searching for permission in missing some things,
Like the giggle or a touch that slowly faded through change,
Like that love at first sight that never made it to name,
Those “unspoken” relationships that never made it to name,
Those misunderstood moments I forgave and delayed an encounter because I couldn’t forget the feeling she gave before  pain.
Those hideaway hearts is where my shelter remained,
Because they kept the love pure when it was easy to drain.
It isn’t easy to contain let alone obtain a power source linked to the brain and refrain from allowing an equivalent vibration; being fear, creep into the domain and create a disease of insane.
“-Insanity is just as contagious as stupidity-”
-Please explain how to maintain love’s stability when hostility is blurred into a thin line.
Inhumane is humane when the word justify emerges in a reign of ignorance which solidifies the moment the sane become repetitive credited to an infection that dried the terrain of perception,
Unreceptive the brain becomes when love is trying to sustain which leads to strain that results in pain and fear burst as a supernova leading to actions in vain again and again,
Oh lord, the power of a woman.
If men could be before doing, we wouldn’t often do things we “shouldn’t”,
“It’s not a matter of wrong or right but evolving into light.”
Is it odd that I acknowledge you, voice inside my head?
“Just as odd as the words left unsaid before night.”
This solitude thing, it isn’t enough anymore, I need something new.
I learned to love myself from red to blue,
And I just reached purple, now all I see is white,
May that energy continue to heal and rise,
Frequency, continue to create shorter and steeper hills, so that I am able to write,
Documentations of this experience  discovering love that’s unforgettable,
Because self hate should never be unforgivable.
That illness is always hospitable,
The existence of love is aboriginal,
Individually being is medicinal and additional if traditional.
Through ourselves is how we connect to all, an adventure to,
Dive within thyself but too many times I forget myself.
Every time I learn to stand, I project and fall like I forget my shell,
Because it’s easier to live life as light than with the body, odd of me to dismiss my health,
Physical problems; wanting love, a senseless touch; tempted to rush a manifestation of her beside me.
That’s the biggest lie when all I need is I and the being inside me.
If this is a human experience, neglecting the body is a serious condition, mysterious as if ID.O.M and 3D have been misspelled,
Then what is hell?
“Death.”
I thought death doesn’t exist?
“It doesn’t, it’s a reality when the state of being is no longer well.”
To be… or not to be…
“That is a question of wealth.”

There's more that meets the eyes
And this will never change
It's too complicated to explain why
The answer will never be the same
Just remember to hold us when we cry
And beware those moments we act insane
Sometimes a firm, warm place to land
Is the only thing to soothe our weary brain
Were difficult at best, impossible at worst
But true love is always on our mind first
Some women want the finer things in life
Some just want children and to be a good wife
Others need to be held and reassured constantly
Some just want to trust and receive honesty
No matter the woman, you'll never understand us all
But keep in mind... There's no greater feeling than the fall

I wrote about you, day and night
You are my moon, you are my sun
I wished for the day when we would finally unite
Like the stars in the galaxy, shining bright
I was dreading the fact that the day might never come
When you wrap me in your arms and tell me it's fine
When you utter those words and protect me for life
My dread was increasing, my hopes were decreasing
I slowly shattered into a deep despair
Losing all senses of a fulfilled life and hope
I thought that the fantasies and dreams in my head are unrealistic and are merely an illusion
But then there you were, my protector, my hero
You grabbed me right at the end of the cliff and held me tight
You reassured and brought my soul back to life
You were my protector, and I was yours
We are now, now and forever, inseparable
For we suffered too long in the absence of one another

after the painting by Mary Fedden

I kept seeing her around and about, but mostly on the beach. This is a small community and after five years or so I know who everyone is, except those who visit in the summer, though I am getting to know some of the regulars. I reckon she’s my age. When she looks at me in the store, and I look at her and smile, her smile tells me these things.

I have trouble with my hair. It’s thinned and doesn’t grow quite as it should. When I was pregnant and then nursing my children it was positively luxuriant. But later, and despite medical advice (and treatment I was unsure about and abandoned) it became an embarrassment, until he reassured me (just once) and I became an ‘adored woman’. He never ever spoke of it again and loved me so wholly and beautifully I had no reason for it to matter in his company, in his arms.

But seeing her, and often on the beach, more and more regularly, seeing her with her mane of strong dark brown hair flowing behind her in the wind, I felt a curious desire for such a wealth of hair. In fact, I began to feel something stir in me that was desire of a different kind. I can’t think I had ever looked at a woman in quite that way in any previous life. It was always men I sought, I wanted.

Her name is Sara, no h, just an A at the end. She said that when I eventually introduced myself. We were walking towards each other, barefoot both on that glistening skin of water the sea creates between the tides coming and going. It was about midday and I was, I was thinking and walking. I do this now. I don’t bring my sketchbook, I don’t look everywhere I can and more so, I have begun to retreat into my most private self. Perhaps it’s my age and so many years of feeling I had to be wholly attentive and active. Being in this remote place, almost permanently, has slowed me down, and I have begun to dream, to see beyond what I usually would have seen moment to moment. I’ve been re-reading the prose and poetry of Kathleen Raine, who understood this sea-swept place and was haunted by its ghosts, and who dreamed.

Never, never, again
This moment, never
These slow ripples
Across smooth water,
Never again these
Clouds white and grey
In sky crystalline
Blue as the tern’s cry
Shrill in the light air
Salt from the ocean,
Sweet from flowers

Oh yes,  ‘the sun that rose this morning from the sea will never return . . .’* I have become a watcher, no longer an observer. I put my camera away last winter and now hold moments in my memory. Here I can sketch. I can have all the time I need, and more. And I knew when I began to talk to Sara I wanted beyond anything else to sketch her, to know her line by line with the pen, and later bring the texture of her into paint.

Painting is where I am now. It’s direct, mesmeric, challenging, wholly absorbing. My needles and thread only deal with our clothes, my clever printing and collaging lies dormant in my studio, a studio I rarely enter now. I have a room upstairs in the loft that is all light and sky. There’s just an easel, a table, a chair, a small bookcase, a trolley-thing of paints and brushes. Even that’s too much. I always collected things around me. I brought so much in from outside and now I’m trying, trying to have as little as possible. This is where I will paint Sara. I’m already thinking this as we take the first tentative steps towards knowing one another. Names, where we live, (we both know). Partners, family, children? I have all this, but not here, only my companion, my love who caresses me with such care and attention. There are my cats and my hens. She has no one, or rather she talks of no one. She asks the questions and avoids giving answers. She just nods and doesn’t answer. Otherwise, she’s a straight yes / no person. She doesn’t feel she has to qualify anything.

We’re standing together. We’re intent on looking at each other. Words seem a little unnecessary because what we both want to do is look. ‘I can tell you paint’, she says, ‘It’s your finger nails’. My perfect nails and the pads of my fingers hold the evidence of a morning at my easel. ‘I have seen your work’, she says, ‘One could hardly not. You’re well known beyond these shores.’ I feel myself blushing slightly. I thought blushing had stopped with the menopause, not that it troubled me much, the menopause that is. Blushing though was a torturous part of my adolescence, but let’s not go into that.

‘Your husband,’ she says, ‘he’s up very early. I see him sometimes here, on the beach.’
‘Do you get up at five?’ I am surprised. My husband gets up before five.
‘Sleep is difficult sometimes. I walk a lot. I need to be out, and walk.’

Her face, her head is larger than mine. She is a larger woman altogether, bigger *****, long-legged, but with youthful ******* that seem taut and well-rounded under her brown frock, no, her brown dress. I only think frock because that’s what he says – ‘I love that frock.’ And he means usually whatever I am wearing now that’s old and rich in memories of his hands knowing me through a dress, sorry a frock, which remains for me (and possibly for him) the most sensuous of sensations, still. Au nature has its place, and I love the rub of his skin and body hair. But when we are lovers, and we are still lovers and usually when travelling, in hotel rooms or borrowed cottages, or visiting friends and dare I say it, staying with our various children. Last autumn in Venice, in this large, amazing marble-tiled room, with this huge bed, he undressed me in front of a window opening onto our own terrace, and I was beside myself with passion, desire, oh all those wonderful things. And for months afterwards I would return to that early evening, remembering the lights coming on all over the watered city as he kissed and stroked and brushed my body through my Gudrun Sjödén frock. I would replay, find again over and over, those exquisite moments of such joyful touching as he then undressed me, and with such care and tenderness I felt myself crying out. Well, he says I did. In one of his poems (for your eyes only, he had whispered) he admits to his own celebration of those moments again, again.

Sara’s dress is calf-length. There’s nothing else. As the breeze wraps itself around the loose-fitting brown cotton her naked figure is revealed inside itself. No ring, no jewellery, nothing to hold her hair now flowing behind her. She has positioned herself so it does; flow out behind her. This is so strange. Am I dreaming this? We have become silent and together look in silence at the sea. I can hear her short breathes. She turns to me with a smile and looks straight into my eyes – and says nothing – and then walks backward a few steps – still with her warm smile – turns and walks away.

I tell him I met Sara today and ask if he sees her on the beach in the early mornings. Yes, he has, in the distance, mostly. He has said good morning to her on a few occasions, but she has smiled and said nothing. Five o’clock is far too early to say anything, he says. She swims occasionally. I keep my distance, he says with a grin.

I tell him I would like to paint her. I should, he says, You should go and ask her, do it, get it done and out of your system. It’s time you stopped being afraid of the face, the portrait, the figurative. I’d give so much to have been able to paint you, he says ruefully, my darling, my dearest. And he strokes my arm, kisses my cheek, then, he slowly and carefully kneels down beside my chair, places his arm across the top of my thighs so when I bend to kiss him his bare forearm touches the edge of my *******. He puts his head in my lap, and I caress his ears, his quite white hair.

Sara’s door is open. She’s living in Ralph’s cottage, a summer-let habitable (just) in the nearly autumn time it is. I call, ‘Sara, it’s me’, thinking she’ll recognize my voice, not wishing to say my name. She appears at the door. ‘I have the kettle on, she says, ‘I had a feeling you might be by.’ Her accent is, like mine, un-regional, carefully articulated, a Welsh tinge perhaps. There’s an uplift and a slowness in some of the vowels. ‘You will come in’, she says, more a statement than a question. It’s rather dark inside. There’s a reading lamp on, but she has the chair, her chair, close by the window. There are letters being written. There are books. Not Ralph’s, but what she has brought with her. Normally, I would be hopelessly inquisitive, but I can’t stop myself looking at her, wondering even now, in these first few moments in this dark room, how I will position her to paint her form, her face, her nature. What will I paint? I look at her still-bare feet, her large hands.

And so, with mugs of tea, Indian tea I don’t drink, but here, as her guest I do, but without milk, we sit, I on the only other chair (from the kitchen) she on the floor. And she watches me look about, and look at her.

‘I’m rather done with talking, with polite conversation. That’s why I’m here to be done with all that for a while.’
‘I came to ask you to sit for me. To let me draw you, paint you even. You can be completely quiet. I won’t say a word. I’ve never, ever asked anyone to sit for me. I’m not that sort of painter. But when I saw you on the beach it was the first thing that came into my head.’
‘I should be flattered. Though I have sat for artists before, when I was a little younger,’ surprisingly she mentions two names I know, both women. ‘I know how to be still. But, those are days in a different life.’
‘I only want to paint you in the life you have now.’ And I realise then that what I want to paint was Sara’s ‘aloneness’. I think then I have never been truly alone since he came into my life and took any loneliness I had from me. Whenever we are apart, and still there are times, he writes to me the tenderest letters, the most touching poems, he quotes his Chinese favourites down the telephone. We always, always speak to each other before bed, even when we are on different continents and time-zones. He told me I was always his last thought before sleep. And I wonder if I would be his last thought . . .

‘Do you want to do this formally?, said Sara.
‘I don’t know. Yet. I’d like to draw you first, be with you for a little while, perhaps to walk. A little while at a time. Whatever might suit you.’
‘Would you pay me? I have little money. It would be useful.’
‘Of course’, I say this directly, having no idea about what one pays a model. He will know though. He knew Paula Rego and didn’t she have a female model? I think of those large full-length figures rendered in pastels. Her model’s name was Lila, who for more than 25 years, had sat for her, stood for her, crouched for her, hour after hour and day after day. I remember a newspaper piece that went something like this: since 1985 Lila has helped to give life, in paint, and pastel, and charcoal, to the characters in Paula Rego's head. Lila was all Paula Rego’s women.

‘Sara’, I said, ‘help me please. It’s taken more than a little courage to come to see you, to ask you. My husband says I should do this, finally get myself painting the person, the face, body, not as some exercise in a life class, but the real thing.’
‘Of course’, she says, ‘Let’s go and walk to the point.’

And we did. Not saying very much at all, but I suppose I did. She made me talk and gradually I laid my life out in front of her, and not the life she would have found in those glossy monographs and catalogue introductions, and God forbid, not in those media features and interviews that I suppose have made me a name I’d always dreamed of becoming, and now could do without.

‘I suppose you have a studio’, she said suddenly, ‘Is that where you’d want me to come?’
‘Yes, I have a studio. No, I don’t think I want you to come there. Not at first anyway.’ I was floundering. ‘ I’d like to draw you, paint you possibly on the beach, where we met, so there would be sea and sky and breeze blowing your hair.’
‘And a steamer out on the horizon belching smoke from its funnel and the sea blowing white horses and dancing about. I’d be right by the seastrand with waves and spray and foam, and under a greyish sky. Not a sunny day. A breezy day. In my brown dress, sitting on the sand by the tide marks, looking out to sea, looking at the steamer away in the distance, sitting with my left hand behind me holding myself up, and the shape of my legs akimbo bent slightly under my brown dress. How would that be?’
‘Perfect’, I said.

And it was.

Dust on fans, cluttered rooms
you're still beside me
I know that's true
red nights, take it how you like
you're still beside me  
I have to thank you
Darker thoughts, and mistrust
you've reassured me, no matter what
I trust you, I do
Past has bruised me,
but eventually they disappear
yours have not, I see that daily
Ill tread with caution,
you seem to save me
Daisies, and messy clothes
my muddy water remains,
We share a lake, you and I
with turtles, fish, and cranes
dragonflies coasting above our rippled waters
our lake is never dry,
you seem to save me,
you and I.

Farewell Govan -
bathed in a baking sun
littered with betting shops
and no win/no fee criminal lawyers
and a myriad of pubs caked in years of libation
steeped in history of industry and shipbuilding
blackened smoked walls etched with gangland symbols:
tooled-up local carnivores who ride shotgun on a BMX
swapping discrete envelopes for indiscreet wads of cash.

Farewell Govan -
you fractured my ribs once in a moment of mistaken identity
I didn't heed the advice to not walk through the park at night
I didn't hear the pitter-patter of adolescent feet
speeding my way in brand new trainers across the grass
but I did feel the clunk of something solid on my head
as the ground rushed up to meet me in a concrete embrace
and watched as 4 bags of overladen shopping spewed out
lying face up spread-eagle in Lilliput fashion
and a mobile torch-app in my face with the repeating words
“Ima tellin’ you man its naw him, its naw him”
I reassured them frantically that I was definitely not him!
as the hooded troupe picked up what was left of my shopping
and even gifted me a couple of cans of super strength lager,
a cube of dubious council estate hash
and an usher to leave immediately
(and think myself lucky).

Farewell Govan -
you got me blazing on cheap beer at the local pub
which had recreated a holiday beach scene
with a hand-written sign that read: Better than Ibiza!
awash with carefree children
and pit-bull terriers wearing bespoke Barbour dog jackets
and brand spanking new Adidas white trainers
purchased from Tam out of a nondescript blue plastic bag
who always passes the day's pleasantries
while topping up his pension
chatting with auld Billy who was in the war (don’t you know)
via the Merchant Navy
and the version of how he was gunner on an oil boat in Vietnam
via the umpteenth pint that afternoon.

Farewell Govan -
your late night shadows harbour an underlying tension
masked with comic humour only if you can understand the lingo
words that are distasteful anywhere else are in fact a term of endearment here
I shall miss the odious vernacular and doth my cap to your spirit
the Salt of the Earth and the Lifeblood of the Community
with at least 40% proof liquids mixed with Irn Bru
purchased at the 24/7 corner store along with a can of processed peas;
one of your five a day.

Farewell Govan -
I go to the sunny side of the Clyde
where it rains just as much
but you don’t get mugged for carrying an umbrella
or asked for the time from a watch-wearing tattooed sailor
and joy-of-joys there will be actual fruit & veg shops
where I don’t have to explain what fresh coriander is
and what you use it for, other than on a pizza;
I was offered dried bottled parsley instead.

Farewell Govan.

I don't think i'll ever fall in love...

Even as I write these words I can imagine the faces of my closest girlfriends, and the well meaning statements of reassurance such a statement might illicit...  

Only... I do not need to be reassured...
When I say i don't think i'll ever fall in love, I'm not speaking from a place of defeat, but rather from a place of recognition, and understanding.  

"Oh, Don't you worry Phillip, you will find a great girl one day :) "

Thank you for the vote of confidence Ashley, I know it comes from a place of great intentions, but...the truth is I have met great women, some I call family, others I call friends, still some I call teachers... and then...some... I whisper to, softly in the night


I have been blessed to meet women who are strong, talented, intelligent (many much more intelligent than I) and beautiful, dear lord, if there is one thing I am grateful for, it is the multitude of beautiful women you have put into my path, their faces shine with perfect symmetry, sharp jaw lines  holding delicate female features, which pluck upon the silver strings of a midnight liar named desire...

It is not for a lack of meeting women that I say I don't think I will ever fall in love, and it is not a shortcoming on their end or a shortcoming on my end that breed this idea, rather, this idea developed from the realization that "to fall in love" has a connotative meaning, a meaning which has been bought by corporations and mass marketed through our media in the form of stories, books, and movies, with redundant story lines that follow a formulaic model that ends in either two dimensional happiness or despair...

When I say, I don't think i'll ever fall in love... I am not saying, I will never love...  
I am in love...
I am in love with life, the subtle intricacies in a delicate tapestry,
I am in love with family, who take time out of their day's to mould me,
I am in love with friends, who hold me down through tragedy,
and...I am in love with all that I have met...

Its just that...I don't believe my love has to come after a fall...

I believe that love is simultaneously eternal and momentary, that the moments crafted in love will be echoed through the halls of eternity, until the Valkyries of Valhalla bring their weary heroes home...I believe that relationships are meant to be fluid, that we are meant to freely flow in and out of one another's lives, and through honesty and consent craft the parameters of our relationships, rather than trying to take people, and through some antiquated notion of "relationship" form a shallow contract to absolve our insecurities,  

I've been in formal relationships where I have felt choked, as if the words I will never leave you linked together around my neck to form a chain of lies ending in...never again

And... I have had friends with whom passions have arisen, and in the dark of night and the secrecy of our abode, our bodies have fused together into a tangled, and sweaty heap called freedom,

To put it simply, I have been in loveless relationships, and love full...well...by contemporary standards...love full nothing's

So please know...That when I say I don't think i'll ever fall in love, I am not saying I will never love...but rather... I will never fall...for the ******* lie...that love can only be fostered through some mundane form of courtship doomed to die...through some, incorporeal ignorance that makes one feel he or she owns the other, fall for the bull that flowers on Valentines day somehow means I get you, or that a diamond means, I love you...

But...also know...that i don't say I will never fall in love...
But rather...
I don't THINK I will ever fall in love...
Because no one person knows the future...

And it may just so happen that one day, in some dusty..smokey..coffee shop I  may be reading this very poem... and in the audience there may be a women thinking to herself that sounds exactly like me...

And through perfect symmetry I may be swept away, the sand castles of my doubt cast out to sea by the tidal waves of our emotion

But...I still don't think I will ever fall in love
Because real love dosen't make you fall,
It makes you soar aloft wings of passion and truth,
And so after this whole rant I believe my original statement needs a revision,
Because now I DO KNOW...that i will never fall in love...
But if i meet the right person...
I just might rise to the occasion

I draped a blanket across my window because my black curtains were allowing too much sun to file in.
I lit inscence which reminds me that I’m home, reminds me that my brother isn’t here.
I laid down, allowed my legs to stretch. Regretfully told them they were not allowed to curl up against me.
I just want to be unconscious for a little while.
I just need a rest. Only for some time, only for some time.
All of my teachers tell me that I can dig myself out of this rut that I was buried in, but they don’t know what goes on inside my head.
No one does but me and whoever is willing to listen
but no one really is
or at least, I tell myself no one really is.
Once people get to a point where they have heard your entire body saying things that make it shake and whine and cry, they build up fear.
They build up a wall. Because no one wants to take care of a shaking, whining, crying mass of anxious feelings and running mascara and bracelets that only feel comfortable if they’re on the left wrist because that body has been given everything on it’s right side and now the owner of it feels the need to repay the left.
There are wind chimes all over my floor.
I hear the sound of cars flying by my window, and birds driving by my head.
I can’t help but wonder how large the sky has gotten.
In this place, in this town, in this neighborhood, in this bed and underneath these blankets, I cannot help but feel as though the sky has shrunk around me.
I can feel its’ pressure on my chest, crushing my lungs.
This is when I go to a psychologist, and she sends me home.
I go home and I beg mother for lights that will make it look like I am surrounded by fairies, because everyone loves fairies.
I want to look up at night and realize that I’m not alone.
That these little creatures will always be there, even when I can’t see them.
But I need to be reassured that they’re real.
I need to be reassured that everything is real.
I need you to tell me you love me.

Laughter jaded by the debris of frowns
Glee of seeing my cousins, spun into a web of pain!
This reunion is a funeral for the lost
Basically the dead, because she won’t return again!
Every person looks into my eyes and I can tell
That everyone else is also in Hell
Just wondering what had to of happened
For there daughter, niece, grandchild to have such a blackened heart.
But please i’m trying to move on
Already starting in the direction of healing and that makes me insane!?
Is the core confusion in conversation around the dinner table, seating forty five
“Please everyone we will all survive”
I say it loud but barely believe it myself
This was supposed to be a party, but turned into a part of me leaving.
Feeling like I’ve only been disappointing
That I messed up something
I’m reassured that the tears are not my doing

10:35 p.m.

Again the man ate too much for his own good. He could barely sit long enough in his car ride home without an involuntary bowel movement threatening to ruin the interior leather of his new convertible car. The same convertible he happened to clean earlier that day, and for the second time that week. Barley able to transition out of his car he wobbled his way to his front door and into his house away from the fascist eyes of his affluent neighbors. He plopped to the living room floor assuming the only position his body was capable of. As he lay spreadeagle on his back uncomfortable and slightly anxious he ripped his shirt off in fear of suffocation. The spinning fan above brought waves of nausea if he starred at it for too long. Rubbing his naked protruding belly seemed to be a brief fix for the brewing pain in his stomach, but then the pain turned for the worse. He felt the sidings of his stomach stretched and the food nearly about to overflow back out of his mouth. A small burp came from his abdomen and he could taste the food as it rose and steamed in the back of his throat. He questioned himself In agony, "Why?". Why would he continue to spoil the treat of dining out at his favorite restaurant in town just to come home in disgust and pain? Is it an inability to stop himself from ordering the biggest plates of food and forcing every single grain of it into his mouth? Or are the pictures that show the plates of food just too enticing for his self control? Is it that the price seems right, therefore it only seems logical to order the full plate and its copious amount of sides to choose from? Perhaps it is just because his finances allow him to and his lack of appreciation for what sparse living feels like, or even worse famine. With no real acknowledgment of the nonrefundable resources he so easily exhaust, not to mention the physical harm done to his body, he was doomed for failure. He winced as he rolled to his side. No burp could subdue the agony of each turn in his stomach. He feared at any second his dinner would decorate his luxurious new rug that he took so much pride in. So much pride it was not uncommon he would insist his guest to bend down and feel the plushness of it every time they stepped on it. Still the war raged in his abdomen. Focused on his breathing, he shut his eyes in hopes of a get away. Struggling to remain still he reassured himself to breath.

11:07 p.m.

Suddenly, like a light switch found in a dark room a life changing truth was revealed to him. One so beautifully powerful it was to change him for good. The awareness of this truth would put an end to his pain and suffering, his lies and imperfections. There was now an answer to the constant void in his stomach, his unquenched hunger, the glass half empty. No longer was he a prisoner of deception. There was an overwhelming fleeting of demons and a mountain of weight lifted. His vision was as clear and vivid as it could ever be. The bliss was not ignorance, not anymore...it was unfeigned truth. For the first time ever he could see life for what it really was. It felt like a lifetime of emotions in one moment. Simplicity surrounded him in every direction. He felt the joy of complete freedom. The weightlessness of eternal peace. He was to tell the world of this untapped truth brought to him. A new and better way to live. An actual sustainable lifestyle free of judgement.

Then without his consent, he abruptly stood up. Dazed and in a state of confusion, he glanced at the clock.

11:11 p.m.

He then looked down and saw what his life cleansing truth was. He had simply soiled himself while asleep, ruining his new living room rug.

My walls are big n strong
Like that of Babylon
None can do me wrong
As I stay on my toes and strive on

The walls seem seamless  
But it's all for a reason
So I'll let you in on a little secret

The pain hid the door
And the gate won't open
Till I'm reassured that I'm not letting in a Trojan horse

The early summer breeze gusts past my skin
A smile rises on my lips
I gaze at you
The warm, orange sunrise eclipses your face
and tints your rosy cheeks
Oh, how mesmerizing, you are

I gently squeeze your hand,
caressing your skin
A silent oath to cherish you for eternity
Your finger twitches in my grasp,
earning a small flinch from me
My head swings down at you
The amber sky and clouds drift past
in the glaze of your distant eyes
Along with my restored smile,
a faint, reassured sigh emits from my nose
Four years later, your little quirks still bewitch me

Enchant me

Captivate me

Seagull’s squawks echo in the sky as they glide past the terrain
Freezing cyan waves of ocean suddenly wash around our legs,
pulling the tawny sands with it
You’ve always adored the beach
Hence, our presence here today
A surprise outing for the fourth anniversary of knowing you
Four years you’ve graced me with
the astonishing, enchanting entity that is,
You.

Since our initial encounter,
our paths were forevermore entwined,
in the manner in which, you simply can not mention one,
without mentioning the other
My lips slide over my teeth
I stare at your figure between my knees
Your outstretched, limp arms gradually sink in the damp sands
Your dull irises absently watch the golden orb rising in the sky
Your essence bubbles from your mouth
I take my thumb, wiping it away

As my final gift to your ethereal soul,
your red sands will spill from your form
in beautiful tendrils of crimson
And just as the yellow dunes,
destined to eternal the lands

Fifty-two is the number found between fifty-one and fifty-three. Fifty-two will never be the sum of any proper divisors of any number. Fifty-two is the international dialing code for Mexico. Fifty-two is the atomic number of Tellurium. There are fifty-two weeks in a year. Fifty-two white keys on a piano. Fifty-two cards are in a deck. And fifty-two years, have led up to this day, and to this paper that you’re holding. This paper in your hands is a letter to you expressing my gratitude. Though it hardly represents a fraction of it. I want to thank you for being an example of what it means to really care for people. Even in anger, you are never unkind. Thank you for the clothes on my back and the roof over my head. Thank you for educating and molding and nurturing me. For loving me through every stupid lie and every too-short skirt I tried to wear to church. Thank you for the coffee-dates you took me on when I was too young to understand that you were showing me how a man is supposed to treat me. Thank you for loving my mother in such a way that I know exactly what to look for in my own husband someday. Thank you for every hug and every kiss and every “I’m proud of you” that built me up and reassured me constantly that I was loved. Thank you for telling me I was smart. Thank you for wrapping me up in that hug that day I tripped and fell and cried because I was embarrassed. Thank you for every birthday and every Christmas and every light-hearted excursion that resulted in more toys I didn’t need. Thank you for your encouragement and constant support. Thank you for every basketball game and every school play you came to. Thank you for always being present. Thank you for holding my hand in public places in spite of the assumptions strangers always made due to the difference in our skin tones. Thank you for never treating me differently than any of my siblings even though I am not biologically yours. I may not share your DNA, but I am a testament to your love. There is no other father I could ever imagine any of my memories being with. There is no other father I want to walk me down the aisle.
There is no other father I would rather have.

- m.f.

when i was a little girl -
i believed my daddy was the smartest man in the world.
he knew everything. everything.
if i had a question, daddy had an answer, and a good one.
always.

his degree was in biology,
but he preached from a pulpit every sunday.
his friends, colleagues, congregation, all knew him as Pastor Brett.
to me he was just daddy -
and he was the smartest man in the world.

on days when i couldn't understand my own head,
(which were, and still are, very often)
and got frustrated with myself to the point of tears,
he would kiss my cheeks and promise me i wasn't stupid.
and coming from him, the smartest man i knew, that meant the world.

as years passed and i grew, my naivety remained with me,
and so i thought i was too smart to fall into life's traps.
i fell. i fell fast. i fell hard. i fell often. and i shattered.
each time, the smartest man in the world picked up my pieces
and reassured me i was still welcome in his home.

he never loved me any less, much to my bewilderment.
however, as my faults increased in frequency and severity,
he picked up my pieces now with weathered hands and weary eyes.
his smile was weaker, and a deep pain stirred in the chocolate irises behind his wire-rimmed glasses.

my deception morphed into vines that constricted and twisted and choked out the truth.
he poured out his love onto an underserving me, and said that God would still forgive.
but i, daughter of the smartest man in the world, am a fool.
and by my own two hands, i continued to sink.

he leaves me to pick up my own pieces now, not loving me any less,
but too weak, too exasperated, too heartbroken to do it himself as he always had.
he is done. he loves me and i know it. he shows it. but he is done.
my tears bore him. my half-true stories and pitiful excuses move in one ear and out the other.
he is stone-faced, no longer shocked by my confessions so i leave them unspoken.

his kisses, sear my flesh. his love burns because i know i don't deserve a single shred of it.
i wish he hated me. i wish we could fight. that would make things easier, right?
but he won't. he just won't. he loves me so much and i can't stand it.
but he is done. i broke my father, and his heart, for nothing.

he asked me why i do the things i do,
why i don't just stop it. why i keep on hurting him and my mother.
i didn't have an answer. all i had to offer the smartest man in the world,
was a dry mouth and empty hands.

m.f.

Loving you was meant to be beautiful
Loving you was meant to wrap me in a warmth
That comforted and reassured the
bottomless pit I call me


Loving you meant I had purpose
Loving you created a blanket that hid
All of the pain that comes with
Not loving myself


Loving you felt dead
Loving you would force me to pretend
That this parasite of you
Was good for me

Here it goes again,
Here it comes again,
The articles about
Psychopaths
And the accusatory tone
Twisting behaviors
Twisting actions
To sound toxic
To sound dangerous
To stamp a big red label on my skin,
Screaming
"AVOID THIS ONE AT ALL COSTS"

While I sit and weep.

But these articles
Blog posts
People fleeing from me
Left and right
Are lies, right?

Tell me, please,
Tell me,
Someone?

My anxiety and need to be reassured
Roots from my PTSD,
And my neediness and wants for attention
Is normal for my upbringing,
Right?

And writing poem after poem
About how much I care for you,
And making playlists
With songs in it
That make me think of you,
Is just a sign that I care,
Right?

I don't want to be
A psychopath.
I don't  want to be
A toxic person,
I don't understand
How telling someone you love them,
Is bad?

But these articles say that showering someone
In constant attention and praise
Means you're a psychopath.

And these blog posts
Are telling me that poems and gifts and music,
All means you're selfish and unfeeling.

But I don't want to be,
I care so much, I love you so much.

I'm afraid
Of who I am.

Miracle factory
Fix me till I'm cured
Change my thoughts
Until I'm reassured

Miracle factory
Please do not give in
I'm always staying strong but
My weight is about to win

Miracle factory
Why did you let me go
I'm not repaired, I'm nothing compared
To the emotions that I don't show

Miracle factory
Now that you've shut down
I've search for self esteem but
It's no where to be found

Miracle factory
I'll always say goodbye
Because once your gone, my weight wins
And eventually we'll all die

Miracle factory
Fix me till I'm dead
You haven't changed my thoughts but
You've overlooked them instead

There is never nothing new
Just rearrange things

I don’t write poems
I just remove the extra words that are in the way

Hold on to the words like whispers and shadows and wings
Recklessly insert adjectives
Tie it all to your delusions of profundity

Dig down deep for pain
no matter how senseless
Pick at your emotional scabs
Bleed

No one likes poetry
Constantly remind people of that
Tell them that you make it sound good to you and **** them
(Even though their ovation means everything)

Slip, dip and weave
With ambiguous wet dreams
Full lips and thick tongue
Mouthing…
Come
to an understanding
***** is much better than clean
Make it filthy
Soil it

Make it nostalgic
People need to be reassured that you were really ******* up as a kid
and that this poetry **** doesn’t just happen to people overnight

Make it esoteric
That way, when no one knows what the hell you are talking about,
you will have a good word to explain why

Say things that are so ill mannered that they are weighty
I will give you an example
“I’m not looking for a girl that is beautiful
I'm looking for one just barely ugly enough to **** me”

Incite large groups of people to *****

Get so personal that it gives people headaches

Expose yourself until everyone is embarrassed for you

Spew it all over the bar
In a drunken stupor
flaunt it lasciviously with your genitals
Pour yourself into reckless collisions
Drink from your soul until it rots your liver

Write until you want to **** yourself
then write about that

Make it as bitter as a Wal-mart associate
Make it so sweet she will swallow it all
before looking up at you with eyes like tiny puddles
To say, “that was beautiful”
(even though it was disgusting)

It should be raw
It should make you itch
It should be like rubbing up against it spreads it
It should be like VD

Make really long
Like it’s your *****
No,
Make it really, really long
Like its my *****

Make it rhyme
I mean don’t
Don’t

Don’t ever write another ******* poem
because I assure you
if I did not write it
than it must ****

and that is how poetry works

Michael L Sutter

1
Shh…the rain cooed, calming the flood that rages
Still a concern…or was
Now placed upon the wetted soil
Transfigured, blessed in holy oils scented with cinnamon.
#2
I grasp at the compass that Donne reassured,
Tragic to find it etched in notes
Of the Song of Swans:
It may commune beneath a firmament of birds
Yet, it seems divided in this steely sky—the color of wrathful swords—
I sniff: it smells of cinnamon.
#3
I am drawn by the scented bliss, anointed in general
That is, with the rest,
But somehow, cologned, it’s too sweet, too new
Now a criminal to laws of ancient Hebrew.
To the iron clouds, the necks will bend,
To turn from he who smells of
Cinnamon
That is, with the rest.
#4
Yet, they do not smell
Nor peel back its bark lest it poison the oil
As rain poisons soil,
And ignore, as they do, when rain is to come,
The oil is fragranced evil with cinnamon.
#5
And though I complain, clack to the mud
It, too, smells of cinnamon,
And so we’re the same.
#6
“****” is my cry. “**** them to their hell,”
Burn the concrete buildings, tear away social offal
That, with some entreaty, seems to plague us all! Why so much Injustice?
Who are you? A God? What makes one lump of clay
A clod, the other a home? Upon the heads of refused beings
How do you stand so tall? You can’t lest your empire fails
While the seesaw of suffering hoist up the side of wails
And smoke the vital oxygen,
Scowls, the first impression
Worried not about advancing goals but living day to day,
The things that move metabolisms, world-wide, subject to pay,
Wasting our lives not in 9-to-5s but looking
And failing to find
And toting excess and praising their holders
While blaming the others born from behind
Partitions drawn in world wars started for oil
For money, for wealth, both so glutted and glutting pride a nation wide
While its cells are tinged with cancer,
Both sides of false dichotomy claiming they have the answer, to answer the question
Of recidivism, the poor and they are to live or get along, dangling the carrot so high
It goes above their dreams, and it’s so blurry that it’s hard to tell
What exactly one pursues,
Or race, religion,
Of a woman’s place in the is to see how absurd such a question should be,
Here is a question that seems appropriate: why are differences discouraged,
Who says what is better but the powers that be
Lenses shaped for us to see only those things specifically made
To make the made untouchable,
And they do it, and will not stop, we’re left with no hope
But from where pleasure is wrought: drugs and sedatives that
Blunt the mind that worries, sober, replacing them until they’re over
But without any solution; a bandage to a bandage
Since a sober mind that cognizes problems can’t possibly solve them in the same state
Of mind.
A lust for love with no genuine conception,
*******, deflowering with cold, stony hearts
Fostered in a day and age where manipulation is more inescapable means
And less insidious art,
So broken by our broken dreams and forced to walk without contention
Compromising on who we are
No struggle to help make us strong
A simple shrug to carry on,
While the most powerful blood, the fire in our veins is given, given, given
To those we think we love,
While we sit dreaming and falling in love with love
Always coddling the scars, where the blood and sinew were streaming
Until they are closed and pink, taut and empty like a drum
Still yearning to beat the same rhythm again,
Needing to learn before synchrony may happen
And two drums may beat to the other’s tune,
Feeling some pulse that holds us feet from decay
All the warmth and butterflies
Come in a zephyr smelling of fetid, carrion meat
That makes true affection
Feel like maggots in the skin
And we leave to new horizons, akin in their process:
Where they end, where they begin.
And yet we’re so weak in every regard, being the forge of our own fortress’ petard
Sade-masochists that run, run, run away
Feeling as though we’re cast to sea, waiting for the problem to deal with itself
A shining light house on a miserable horn
Hides by our back, the shore receding out, and even in the darkness
The vastness of the sea, there’s still the light cast ‘cross the sky
With the same, though fleeting, periodicity.
And I can do nothing, least, nothing of worth
Being as I am, a whiny little white boy with middle class struggles,
Well-fed, well-cared for, and some domestic unrest
But I am minor, mediocre at best,
And have never had the muscles, the mettle, put truly to the test.
So I can only complain beneath the anthill of my worries
And all my attempts to make any change are thwarted by my failings, my comfort
My life,
Doing drugs, self-medicating because it’s the best I can come up with
Spiraling beyond uncontrollable until it is no longer
Me whose spinning down to destruction,
That was something of the past
Now, I truly have nothing to grasp
And I kick and I scream and I try and I try and I try
But look in dismay at any hope I may have for people to change, yet their conduct belies
A sense or desire to be anointed enspiced
Since the general oil has seemed to suffice, and that’s not enough, but I just want some change
Some honesty, but I can’t find it, I know not what I feel
All this angst piling up, like a chapter in the life of Holden Caulfield:
He’s my ******* idol since I pressed with all this
Stupidity with no venue but complaints
And this is doing nothing, this ******* poetry, neither solving nor affording comfort
Back to me. It is art and no one cares
It has no voice, save the face-value point
And I want meaning, and so I try to make it knowing full well
The intention is demeaning, but not in my writing
Its filthy fingers touching on everything that I’d like to achieve
Legitimately, but it’s all conditioned
It’s breakdown is imminent  
If only I knew how accept
Oils scented with cinnamon.
I wish I was different, or acted upon it, instead of just ******* in the lines
Of a sonnet,
Or that others may smell of their own fragranced oils
Then trifles, then problems may seem something
Of little toil
But, but, but, where am I to go, where do I begin?
I’ve gone in circles, where I stopped I’ll start again
And I’ll never escape because…
#7
Shh…the rain cooed, calming the flood that rages
Still a concern…or was.
In due time the sun will do as it does:
Show us what is, is soon to be what was.
The nature of me, with little consistency, is grasping for a dawn
I see it coming up
Now that I’ve smelled the breeze
Of cinnamon.

The first time I heard it, I could not believe it. Did I hear it right? My son, Kyle, had a girlfriend, and her name was Jezebel Kawalak. That was her true name, honest to God. I thought maybe Kyle was joking, but that really was it.  Kyle was surprised himself, thinking she was joking, so Jezebel showed him the proof on her birth certificate. It was her mother’s idea to name her Jezebel. Her father was against it.

“She goes by Jez”, Kyle told me. “Everyone calls her Jez”.

I was making dinner when he told me the news of his new friend. I stopped cutting up some carrots and looked at him with great skepticism. “Jezebel? Who on earth would name their daughter that? Don’t her parents know that the name, Jezebel, is a putdown?”

I remembered the old Betty Davis film, and she was supposed to be some kind of ******. I decided to look up the name in the Bible, and Jezebel was not a nice woman, but an evil seductress and the daughter of a king. I didn’t know much about that Jezebel character from the Old Testament, but I knew she was far from nice.  Now Kyle reassured me that Jez was not all what her name implied. She was a shy, sweet girl who lived across the street and twelve houses down from us. She was petite, gentle in nature, which added coolness and calm to the picture, for her sweet nature coexisted in tune with my son’s impulsively creative disposition.

“Jez wouldn’t hurt a fly”, Kyle told me.

“Oh, sure” I said back. “But will she hurt you?”

Kyle and Jez were both sixteen and both in the tenth grade. They also attended the same high school, making their friendship all so more convenient. They were even in one class together, an English class. Like Kyle, Jez came from a divorced home and both were only children. Jez’s mom, Tammy, worked three jobs to keep things afloat, and Jez was often left alone at home to fend for herself. It was not surprising that she got quite lonely and was in need of a good, solid companion.    

Kyle never had a serious girlfriend before. He had gone out a few times with a few girls, but none of them were ever more than a brief date or two. I was glad for that. I sometimes worked a double shift as a hospital nurse and, ready or not, I was forced to deal with this new path in my son’s life. I could not always be around to make sure my son was doing what he was supposed to do. And he was far too old for anyone to really watch over him. He was still working on getting his driver’s license, slowly gaining more freedom as he was gradually gaining more trust from me. I did not like this hesitation in me, for I always knew quite well that this time would eventually come. Yet everything seemed like it was coming too fast, and I could not contain the breaking dam of my son’s ever increasing entrance into manhood.

“It is probably not like you think”, my mother told me about Kyle and Jez. “They seem like just good friends, like she is the sister that Kyle never had”.

My mother could not convince me that she knew what she was saying, not with that remark. Come on! I wasn’t born yesterday!

For the longest time, it was just the four of us, which is until my sister moved to Miami.  Kyle, my mother and I lived in Cleveland, and that seemed like a stab in the heart to me when my sister first left. But I eventually convinced myself that I could not be so selfish, and I learned to adjust to just now only “the three of us”. Kyle saw his father but his father and I divorced when he was the age of four. Since that time, he had three strong women in his life, his mother, his aunt, and his grandmother. We were not a big family, but we were a tight family unit. Whenever I had to work and when Kyle was in need of a sitter, my mother watched him. She deserved the credit for raising my son just as much as I did.

Kyle reasoned with me that he and Jez could be good study partners for each other. I rolled my eyes at that one. There would be more of Kyle playing his guitar than anything. He loved his guitar, practically was self-taught, and I had to admit that Jez had a beautiful singing voice.  Kyle loved to compose his own songs as well as he liked to play some from other artists, and he was pretty good at his talent. The trouble was that as soon as made something up in his head he quickly forgot how some of the songs went. Sometimes, he could get it right and sometimes not. But that was not because Kyle wasn’t smart enough. Actually, he was very bright.  Kyle could dream in his sleep about music and wake up frantically trying to remember what new song he was dreaming up.

The two of them sounded really sharp together, Kyle’s strumming and smooth singing and Jez’s soft back up vocals. There was no denying that they looked just as good as they sounded together. I would study Jez over as she sat next to Kyle on the couch with her golden brown hair clipped up on the back of her head, her eyes peacefully closed, and her small frame swaying in the rhythm of the music they were making.  If they weren’t working on live music, they’d be cranking up the stereo or watching television much more than they would be hitting the school books.

I was shocked when Kyle and I were alone at home and he said something quite out of the blue and totally unexpected. “You practically gave up on men, didn’t you?” he asked me.

“I beg your pardon, young man!” I snapped at him. I gave him a sharp glance and that was all that I had to say about that. I never expected him to say such a thing. Frankly, I was dumbfounded.

I did not feel like I had to answer to my son, but driving to work that day I had wondered if he was right. If my life was not wrapped around the needs of my son, my energies were put into my career. I enjoyed my independence, not like my mother who never worked outside the home once she was married. And when my father died, my mother’s financial needs were taken care of because of all those years of his hard work. It seemed like my mother came from a dying breed, not that I faulted her for who she was, but I had to take care of myself. I felt it was the right choice and better than the alternative of marrying for convenience.

Was I really that fearful of another commitment? It seemed that no man I had met since my divorce could be a good enough stepfather figure for my son. At least, I believed that was a good enough reason for me to remain unattached. How could Kyle ask me that anyway?

One day, he was destined to leave the house and have his own life. I was always so smug about women who seemed to have no life outside of their children, but was I only fooling myself? Before I knew it, I would be coming home to an empty house. Would I be alright being all alone?

All I knew is that I wanted my son to be happy, and I thought I did a pretty good job of helping him be that so far. For now everything seemed fine, but I could see how Kyle was really falling hard for Jez. In my worried mind, there was no denying that.

“You assure me that you will do nothing that you cannot undo”, I warned my son. “When I am not here, there is to be nothing done under my roof. And you know what I mean!”

“Mom, come on”, Kyle answered me. “I would never do anything like that in your house!”    

I looked at my son with a mixture of pride and sorrow. It was now I who had to look up to him to talk to him. It seemed like yesterday when I was the one towering over him. Now he was almost six feet tall, was now shaving, and was handsome like his father, his dark shaggy hair dusting his light brown eyes. I sure could not stop him from growing up. Trying to control that situation was like trying to control heaven and earth. Slowly, I was learning that I had to let go of him, for his sake and for mine.

Deep down, I knew Kyle wouldn’t do anything in my house. But I also knew that those two did not need my house to do the unspeakable, what I would not quite say to my son in proper words. I knew I was being unrealistic for some silly fear that if I said “***” it would egg on his teenage desire all the more.  Nor could I keep my son under lock and key to stop those flooding feelings.
  
It soon came to be that Jez was over every day. Why didn’t they ever go to her house? But then I was glad they were under my roof, like that would keep them out of trouble.  Jez’s house was rented and much smaller than ours, even though ours was not spacious by any means. Jez seemed to feel more at home in my house, and soon she was growing on me. Before long, I was quite used to her, for she somehow crept into my heart and won me over.  I had to admit that she almost seemed like a daughter to me.

“You did not have to make these”, I told her about a batch of oatmeal cookies she baked me.

Jez smiled at me and said, “Your favorite, with no raisins”. She put them in a cake box that she ******* with a purple ribbon and handed them over to me. She had such a sweet disposition that I wanted to tell her to go yell at her mother for giving her such a ridiculous name, but simply smiled back and gave her a hug.  

“I can see you really like her”, said my smirking mother. She had come over for dinner and was sitting with me at the dining room table. “She is really good for Kyle and you know it, too”.

Kyle just came around from out of the kitchen. “Thanks Grandma”, he said to her, and gave her a quick hug and kiss on the cheek. He then gave me thumbs up as if to show that if Grandma approved, it was a done deal.

I could not disagree with my mom. Yet I wondered what Jez’s mom would think of everything. Even though she lived down the street I never met her. I wanted to invite her over, but she was always too busy working or taking care of things. How did Jez cope with her always being gone? She needed her mother just as much at sixteen as she did when she was a young girl.

“She works pretty hard”, Jez once told me. “I feel kind of bad because maybe she would not have to work like that if I wasn’t around”.

“Jez, don’t think that way!” I exclaimed.  I could see the tears welling up in her eyes. Kyle, sitting next to her, put his arm around her and gave her a good squeeze to make her smile.

Kyle admitted, “Jez’s dad always told her she is welcome to live with him. She could but she’s not so geeked about it. He lives in California, in San Diego”.

“And he has a swimming pool and a Jacuzzi”, Jez added. “So you think I’d be crazy not to go there”.

“I’d rather live in warm weather, all year round, with a pool to swim in every day”, Kyle confessed to her.

Emphasizing her remark by playfully dotting his nose with her fingertip, she said to him, “Kyle, you know that Cleveland has one thing that San Diego does not have”.

“What’s that?” he answered in a silly voice, gleefully playing dumb.

Giggling a little, she said “You”.

Kyle leaned over, and pecked her with a kiss on her mouth. I could feel the heat in my face, embarrassed that I was blushing over an innocent kiss. But I never saw my son kiss a girl before, not in a romantic way. I got up out of my chair before they could see my discomfort. How foolish I felt! After all, I was a nurse and nothing should have shocked me like this.

There were times I felt that I had more than a leg to stand on with my fears. There was a fine line between innocent times with each other and too much togetherness, and it seemed like Kyle and Jez were crossing it.

Usually on Friday or Saturday nights, Jez and Kyle would watch a horror movie. They both loved horror flicks, the more blood and gore the better. Both loved the classics, from the original Night of the Living Dead to the modern ones like Drag Me to Hell. They’d always snuggle together on the couch with the lights off and big bowl of popcorn, and if I was not working I would be extra watchful. They could be up till past one o’clock in the morning and, even if I needed the sleep, I stayed up right with them.

Often, Kyle and Jez would fall asleep together on the couch before the movie ended. They had gotten that cozy. A few times, Kyle would wake up to still find Jez sound asleep. She was quite a sound sleeper, more than Kyle was. Instead of waking her up to take her home, Kyle would scoop her up in his arms and carry her to his bedroom. In turn, she barely made a stir but rested her head upon his shoulders, letting him take her away from the living room. After laying her upon his bed, Kyle would come back to sleep on the couch.

“How are you going to explain this to her mother?” I asked, confronting him about it”.

“I’m not sleeping with her, Mom!” he argued with me. “You can see I am staying on the couch! Jez’s mom has some new boyfriend, so why would she feel like she even belongs home? Yeah! That’s right! He is crowding Jez right out of her own house! Do you have to look at me like that? Like I am the bad guy, or something? He is living with her mom, sleeping in her bed. Why do you think Jez never wants to go home? The guy’s a total loser! He creeps her out.”

I knew I had to eventually talk to Jez’s mom. I needed her input and she needed mine. As much as I liked her, I just did not feel like Jez should be around so much. It seemed like she lived at my house when she really did not.  The only news I heard about her mom was that Tammy was angry at her daughter for not helping to clean up the house more. So now I found a sound excuse to help Kyle to listen to reason.

I had to tell him to listen to me, to trust my better judgment and experience in spacing out his time with Jez. Perhaps, he needed to see her every other day. To Kyle, that was a hard sacrifice but, along with becoming an adult, came some necessary lessons.

“If Tammy wants her daughter to be more responsible at home” I told him, “you have to learn to respect that”. Deep down, Kyle knew I was right.

So those in between days, with no visits, Kyle was either instant messaging Jez on our computer or talking to her on the phone.  He may have listened to his mother, but he was finding enough ways to not take me as seriously as he should have.

I found myself wishing that Jez would just go away. That feeling did not last long before my guilty conscience got the better part of me. Jezebel Kawalak really was a sweetheart. Everyone who really knew her loved her.

“Do you feel like she is competing with you for Kyle’s time with you?” my mother asked me.

At first, I was ready to tell my mother how out-of-line she was with that statement. Did I seem that selfish? This was the time in Kyle’s life when the childish diversions in life were being replaced with more important things like earning his own money and planning what college he wanted to go and what he wanted for his future.  Or maybe I had to accept that he would tell me that college was not for him. Now he could play his guitar and dream of being a rock star, but reality was ready to kick in for both of us.  More carefree days like these were beginning to look scarce.

I had to admit that Jez became a threat. I worried that she had a high likelihood of ending up pregnant. What would happen then? Kyle was not mature enough to deal with that possibility. I still had those desires to see Jez just go away.

One night, I was going to get what I wanted. But it was something what I never would have wished for.

It was a long day at the hospital for me. I had barely the energy to eat the diner that Kyle had made for me. He was a pretty good cook as he had to learn to make his own meals when I was working. I was brushing my teeth when I thought I heard a knock at the door, but the television was on and I wasn’t sure.  

“Kyle, is someone at the door?” I asked him.  I heard no answer.

I went into the living room and the front door was open. In the dark, I made out the two silhouettes of Kyle and Jez sitting on the cement on the front porch.

I turned the porch light on and gasped. Jez was leaning on Kyle, her face battered and her lip bleeding.

“Let’s get her inside!” I ordered Kyle.

He helped her up but she was stumbling badly. Kyle lifted her up into his arms, and she winced in pain as he carried her inside.

Kyle sat in a chair and kept Jez cradled in his arms, caressing her bruised face with his

Your memories were numbed by the new situation
You swear you saw a kindly face, not unlike your own
That picture blinded by the lights, the fanfare plays
Enter the gladiators
Where was that hidden genesis chapter?
You were the amusement for Adam
Moulded from the image of the clown
Dance boy dance, sing for your supper
Fulfil your role, ****** upon your damaged soul
You swear you recall being wrapped up warm
Arms engulf your childlike frame, where have they gone?
Now dropped before the flashing lights...
Camera... Action!
You're a caricature of the "superiors"
Aping the actions so beyond the dumb jester
Smile on cue when they glare at you
Electricity jolts your arms in motion
Smoke the cigarette, spill your drink
We laugh at you, we want to touch you
So cute, so funny, so real
What are you? Bust just a clown
Created from god's sick humour, man's new toy
Spend your childhood dancing till the lights go down
From the limelight to the concrete
From stage and screen and the attention it brings
To the wasteland of iron, rust and rot
Too old to melt our fickle hearts
Adam's bled you of your use, he's had his fill
Reassured that he still holds dominion

Why is it I always find myself laying in the wet grass staring up at constellations with a set of chromosomes lighting up a cigarette that don’t belong to you?
This time the LSD flowed through the veins of a boy with blonde flowing hair. I laid next to him and tried to keep up with and envision what he saw and felt that night, and I think he could tell that I wasn’t exactly sure what he meant when he tried to describe it and he sighed with the faintest hint of frustration, but I reassured him with a simple
“talk about it.”
And he began to.
to use his hands, silhouettes against the dark violet sky, twirling and dancing, the stars twinkling and shining light between the shadowed fingers like the sun through trees. he described looking up at a circle of white light of life, and from it stemmed four hallways or paths, and then how there was a giant hand in the sky plucking at the stars, and then how the stars “danced, almost seductively, (no, seductively isn’t the right word, but it’s the easiest way to explain it)” for his eyes only. And how he was melting into the grass on our backs and the way Something by the Beatles made him feel something, and he asked about my writing and understood my anxiety and traced his tattoos in the dark, painting pictures of the ones I’d never noticed, the sparrow, the compass, the hamsa, with his words.
I felt as if I were tripping too, like the tiny tab dissolved into my own tongue for forty five minutes until it made it’s way down the back of my throat with a sip of water. Like I could feel myself melting into psychedelia with each syllable that rolled smoothly off of his tongue. Like the giant hand in the sky was mine, and I plucked the little lights like the strings of a guitar, like they burned my fingertips the way the flames from lighters did when I tested how slowly I could wave them over my fingers before I felt the heat when I was a child. Like the earth grew into me, like vines slithered their way up my spine and my vertebrae blossomed into lotus flowers, like Something by the Beatles made me feel something.
The earth was raw; it was so real.
Yet reality had never felt farther in a sober state.
I felt touched and untouchable, invincible and invisible, desired and deserted.
We finally stood and walked away from our little bed of leaves but they didn’t want me to leave- they tangled themselves in my hair and he told me to leave them in because it looked lovely.
So I did.
And I found you, where I always do.
You were laughing your acid off in the fluorescent lights of your bedroom.
And your eyes were green and your cheeks pink and your palms open and your mind
untouched by the untouched beauty we experienced and the enlightening clarity and the knowledge we sought under the all-knowing night sky.