"Just Words" That tongue is a loaded gun. Point and fire away. Take aim and let the flame of what you have to say make them pay. Let its heat radiate with the power, let it shower down in diatribes to be idolized, soliloquize until you’ve civilized the madmen raving in the street. Defeat? You ain’t beat until they’ve knitted your lips shut with barbed wire. Till they’ve broken every little finger so you can’t take up a pen. And then? You still have your feet. The Tower of Babble was a catalyst. It was the wakening of every activist with a sign and a grudge, every antagonist with slander and a bottle of poison. We didn’t reach heaven with bricks. We didn’t cross Styx with a bridge. We made angels tremble with our clamor. We wove a glamor to enamor Narcissus through our lips. From our mouths drips a venom that makes snakes quake, we raise bedlam that breaks foundations of nations and echoes throughout generations. We conceived Salem by hissing through our teeth. This is a sword you can’t sheath. They writhe underneath every half-assed grave, craved by the cowardly and taken up by the brave. They’ve been the liberators of slaves and the tools of the depraved, they’ve been the thing by which we are saved and the roller that paves over our fallen State. Don’t hesitate. Emulate the voices of the dead which you admire, Emanate this force until you are a spire, climb higher, never tire, let it course through your veins and release the reins and strain against every effort to bring you back down again. You’ve got words, baby. When the world tries to bring you to your knees? Say, bitch, please.

Fading She was important. He knew that. Knew it like he knew rain fell from clouds. Clouds in a dreary grey sky that the sun couldn’t penetrate. That fact alone he clung to, but he lost the why of it, lost it with each passing day and as time went on even within the hour. He felt it, deep and visceral, the need to know her. To reach out and touch her. He knew he had many times before. Knew – Their wedding night. Fumbling passions. Hands that roved but didn’t quite know where or how. New, and fresh, and old-fashioned. He cupped her face and leaned to kiss her lips, kiss her deep. Something wrong, something not right about it, the wrinkles in his fingers there like furrows against her cheek. Why? Where had the years gone? No, he hadn’t aged so much. She hadn’t. Her hair a white mass of cotton, her eyes so wrinkled and worn and blurred with cataracts. No, something was wrong, her name, he needed that, reached towards it but couldn’t do it with his shaking hands. Reached with something else, his mind, a rattling old machine. Churn, screech, emission of smoke like The train was coming. He could see it on the rails. It would bring her, slow and steady, chugging along. The first time he saw her, pale and beautiful. Skin not like his. Not calloused from hard work. White dress, white parasol to blot out the harshness of the sun. There she was, looking at him, saw him smeared in coal dust from the filling of the engine. Her smile. Oh, God in heaven, her smile. She walked towards him. She. She Best not to disturb him. We don’t want to make him upset. There. Yes. There she was, he remembered now. She moved in, lived there in that town, lived there like clean cloth covers a stain. Gracious. Undemanding. Softness of politeness and lace. She was kind to him. She was kind to all. She was above all and lorded over none. That she spared a glance his way was beautiful, always beautiful. It didn’t matter if those teeth were hers or polished fakes, it was the way her eyes crinkled. The way it just consumed her face. As if for just a brief moment her magnanimous existence had in some way been refined by his meager presence. He had to have her, but not like others wanted to. The dowry was just an obstacle. He had to have her like a rose nurtured and held behind glass, to protect it from the weather but let the sun in. To glory in it for what it was, for as long as he was able. He would work, yes, he gained the money. He would? He did. He did, yes, just a moment, there it was. Flitting, fleeting, reach for it. He’d done this thing. This was his past. His history, his STORY. He could see it as his, her face hovering just in the corner, brilliant. Unblemished even when it was. Her name I don’t think that’s a good idea. You’re going to make him upset. You really shouldn’t tell him. Footsteps. Someone came. Someone’s coming. Almost there. Hovering, it’s hovering, all he had to do was reach out and take it. His tongue danced, his hand, that shaking hand (when did it get so old?) reached and reached and reached and Gone. Where? Where was it? Where was he? A name, that’s what he’d wanted. A name. But whose, and why? Had it been Do you recognize this woman? A picture held up. There, smiling. There, eyes crinkling. Familiar, maybe. Vaguely familiar, like a face he’d seen on the street once. She died today, Mr. Carter. I’m sorry. He shrugged. I didn’t know her anyway.

Pretty Prison Cell Cage, gold-gilded by wagging tongues speaking kind-hearted words that lack wisdom, paint the bars, paint the image of what #life could be if I simply –list your credentials here please, – wings clipped, otherwise ‘one could smash into the window and break!’ you can never fall if you never really fly, never tumble if you don’t leave the nest, but you just wanted to feel the breeze outside, they let you see it but remind you it isn’t achievable, not even believable, behind the restrictions and in that pretty prison you are safe, and sure beyond the glass they look happy, but here you’ll never face the hawks and falcons and storms besides a rattling of the panes, and though the water tastes stale you’ll never go thirsty, and the seed might seem dry but you’ll always be full, forever lovingly, tenderly, kindly |confined.|

The Eye We’re the eyelash, the irritant lodged inside it can’t weep out, despite the nights spent sobbing and the tears streaking down, we persevere to burrow deeper, entrench ourselves in tender tissue, it spies the bodies we pile higher, awash in blood we freely shower, other times we are like water, coaxing free what it has witnessed, faces flush with lively color, passions tangled beneath covers, dancing like a whirling fire, candles that have not burnt out, we ravage and we rile, create destroy and oft beguile, the eye sees all atop the world, sees our tattered wings unfurl, moths drawn to a scheming light, either wakened or destroyed, we are art she dares to see, a gorgeous aching misery.

Haunted House The place reeked of moth balls, of old ways to get rid of old problems, remedies that never worked, it smelled of dead things, of musk from pretty garbage piled high on walls and left to degenerate, left for time to disintegrate, left from shopping trips that failed to kill the sorrow, long lost pets rotted into the carpet, trapped where they couldn’t get out, a cat’s bones lodged in the chimney desperate to breathe air, the ghosts there discontent, phantoms of what once was living alongside the dead, a home that had its day and now with a groan it saw what it had made and was dissatisfied, saw the children raised in halls not so hallowed and remembered the slapping was louder than the kissing, than the laughter and the lovemaking, tainted memories seep into the ceiling, the floor, the roof-tiles so they can’t reach heaven, can’t be cleansed, sinking into the ground as the foundation gives way, wondering if it hadn’t been a little crooked all along.