experiment in disturbing violence...

The red of your anger is the color of blood. It courses angrily through your engorged veins, but you hide it well; it shows only in the tiny twitching of your jaw. Your deep chocolate eyes casually take in the room, noting possible weapons. Only blunt objects here: a desk lamp and a paper weight. It seems the knives are in the other room.

Break the window, you think to yourself, maybe I'll be lucky and get sharp shards. After all, the payment you're after is agonizing, lasting pain.

Like the blacksmith's iron rod in flames, your wrath burns hotter. Anger turn to fury soon, from vivid orange to citrus yellow, stopping finally on blinding white. The blood now pounds in your ears like his hammer on anvil, threatening to burst your skull. But in your wrath you ignore the sound and continue to feed the inner outrage. You appear stoic but revel in the thought of the aggressor's vital fluid spilling to the ground. Your mind's eye watches as the carpet drinks it slowly and the eyes of your opponent flit, nearly lifeless, from side to side.

Furrowing your brow, you sit and manage to clear the satisfying image from your head. Karma's a bitch, you know, and you hope she's taken note to act on your behalf.

i can't shake you

It's the feeling of a crawler on your skin,
the prickling hairs on the back of your neck
because of eyes watching in the shadows,
and the sleepy stupor after dinnertime.

like that last drop of water from the swimming pool,
i just can't shake you.

you're in my head through daytime hours,
upon waking through the setting of the sun.
your face is the last i see before i sleep
and the only one that haunts my dreams.

I just want you to go away,
but no matter what I do
the fact that you're not with me
makes that impossible to do.

prose poem ii

I'll use your world to write in for a time. Mine is dull and insentient where yours is full of life. The blank panorama of my page could use some cheery hills, though looming mounds would serve me just as well. If you don't mind I'll borrow the cottage nestled in the woods and even take the lurking wolf besides. His grizzled jowl and dripping fangs are fierce but even that will better this naked set. Your skinny trees with many knots and too few leaves will add depth where there now is none, and thistle bushes, while not lovely rose, will add a certain homeyness. I'll even take the grandma with her crooked back and warty nose. Her cloak, black as death and just as ragged, hides beneath its folds endless fear and mystery, but the blood flows warm within her veins, in any case, and can't be worse than the cold in my world now.

prose poem

If someone could lift the basin of your pain and empty it over the endless world, lakes would swell and push their bounds to make new rivers. They'd flow to the sea as ever and as high, for the ocean has always flowed over mountaintops. But your pain would push it higher, driving the shores inward upon themselves until the tallest land-locked peak were covered.

The clouds know no dew like this, and God with all His 40 days and 40 nights would flounder in your flood.

Still, remember my dear, that the phoenix of your love flies ever over the glassy front. Tides will ebb and flow as they do and eventually he will make his perch. There, the crimson creature of your love will nest, burn and rise again, a fact that you will never change; for it ensures while you're in pain, your love unfailingly remains.