Why strive?
I've been handed the world.

There's longing here,
for...
... something.

Something more?

I see my brother
from time to time.

I still see Mom.
She still chastises.
Her voice resides
deep in my mind.

I don't know
what it is
that I'm trying to convey.

I don't know
what else to say.

I'm sorry.

The bar wrapped around in the shape of a question mark,
as if it knew we didn't know why we were here.

Deco lamps hung above since long before we existed,
cigarette smoke left the stained glass tinted
an unfortunate yellow.

Right-angle mirrors play tricks on my eyes as I see myself,
rightfully hidden behind hard liquor on the shelf.

I can't help but try to remember the light of my smile,
so I try one out on my face for awhile becoming
an uncertain fellow.

The reflection in that tricky mirror seemed to be
showing that we had become only me.

With a salacious grin
he pictures her in
his bunk beds.

He giggles and ponders
if she would like the top,
or the bottom.

She comes to me in my dreams,
and now I'm addicted to sleep.
Nothing is ever as it seems,
when I'm forty winks deep.

don't just bear your ******* teeth at me.

Sometimes those words left unsaid
go on chasing their tails in my head
until I finally get to spout them out
to anyone who happens to be around.

They'll look at me with a questioning eye,
so exquisitely curious as to precisely why
I felt that they were the one with whom I'd share
the fact I **** my pants and ruined my underwear.

"I was going mad!" I'll say with a glare.
"I had to tell someone, I suppose...
You just so happened to be there,
and so that's just the way it goes."

I click on her face
and look at new words
and look at old words
and look at her world
I read her poems aloud
and break out in gooseflesh
because it's like I can feel
her next to me
whispering
my name

On the edge of the bed she sat
ripping page after page out of a
yellowing paperback dictionary.

The muted orange glow of the
arc-sodium street lamps outside
of the bedroom window cast her
face in shades of fire, and the sounds
of tearing paper mocked her
in sharp snores of the sleep that
would not greet her weary mind.

Certain words and definitions
would catch her eye in brief
inspiration, but the feeling
was always gone before
the page even hit the floor.

Strips of clothing and shredded
documents littered the carpet and
covered the bed in spiteful layers
of contempt as the scissors she used
to massacre his favorite shirts and
jeans lay open in her lap, still hungry
for more of the revenge she had been
enacting all night long.

Her fingers began to cramp up
and she realized that she was
bleeding from countless paper
cuts covering her knuckles, leaving
macabre fingerprints on the pile
of torn pages from his pocket
dictionary now lying between
her bare feet and painted toes.

Now removed from her trance
by the acute pain and blood
she managed a fleeting glance
at the page still in her palm,
numbered 236-237 and right
on the cusp of the L section
and the M section, she spied
the word that drove her to
this in the first place.

Beneath a darkening crimson droplet read
"love n  1: great and warm affection,"
she sighed, crumpling up the thin
paper and popped it in her mouth as she
began to chew and began to cry.

She chewed and she cried and she chewed
until it was nothing more than a *** of pulp,
tasting faintly of copper and resting sourly on
her tongue, when she swallowed it whole and laid
her throbbing head down on the shredded
pillow, finally able to get some sleep with her
tummy full of love.