The powerful man
Pitchfork-armed, chasing the girl
Tine-first, ready to strike

She is today’s unfortunate rage object
Hapless, wrongless victim
Weaponless, shieldless casualty

He is blind privilege righteous
Incandescent from his
latest, baseless, graceless
gotcha!

Forehead veins pulse sickly blue-green
Gas giant magnitude pupils
Each aperture an onyx void
Irony in sympathetic nervous system arousal

If he can wound her
– really break her,
he will quiet that feeling
The one that creeps and gnaws
Whisper screaming
Especially at night

Impossible conscience
Poor Jiminy Cricket
Eyes sticky with tears
Best efforts in vain

How do we retain compassion?
Scaffold empathy?
Bolster sanity?
While absorbing the violence
Of the man who flattens his beer cans
   with a hydraulic pancake car crusher
who cuts his delicate finger sandwiches
   with a restored 1790s guillotine
who sets his table
   with longsword steak knives
   and matching pitchforks
   a set, for special occasions

Vast energy required to remain soft
When distant and diamond hard
Is the path of no resistance

All this energy
Feels wasted
Why can’t we collect it?
Battery store it?
Pitchfork narcissist anode
Empath cathode
Could power a city
Energy crisis solved

We tend to extract the- 
complexity out of the mouth of simplicity,
counting till 10 is a necessity. 
But remains a struggle
in times of words nascency.
Trust me it's not a matter of literacy. 

You lack the visibility of our daily-
neurological battlefields
at the front line, we remain helpless and shieldless.

We're not pulling the triggers.
once shot at, can't be taken back
don't blame our mouths for shooting opinions -
blame an intuition that knows all the facts 

Wittiness comes at a price. 
Friend, I am sorry that you have to pay the bills, sometimes

Another cup of coffee.
Please.
I need to wake up.
The night’s dreaming has left me
disjointed.

surprised

to be alive.

It’s not the first time.
Not at all.
I’ve lived in the nightmarish dark
far too long,
far too often.
I am experienced in blindness,
swinging my sword at ghosts,
shieldless save for God.
Each day new wounds bleed.
Each day new wounds heal.

And so here I am.
A decade and more later,
a collector of scars,
a strange sort of warrior,
living in the half light.