Night
Is the time of poets
Of writers
Of painters
Of thinkers
Of people
Who make worlds
In their heads.

Night
Is when I sit and scribble
And flick
And splash
And imagine
And create
A universe
In my bed.

Night
Is when people love
And laugh
And cry
And scream
And become
Real and tangible
In my mind.

Night
Is when worlds quake
War breaks out
People revolt
Empires fall
Nations rise
From the ashes
In my pen.

Night
Is when worlds form
War ends
People accept
Empires are healthy
Nations are strong
Because I love the people
In my head.

Tortured people tell themselves the past never happened.
They sit and reminisce about memories that they created.

Their hands are brown and worn down,
looking like a sibling of the ground that will eventually be a tomb for their bodies.

The teeth are fake and so are the smiles.
Hair falls off like rusty leaves brushed by a breeze, warning of the death of winter.
Limbs turn into string, ******* hang, and guts grow; like pregnant, stray cats.

Whenever they die, their houses will be eaten by their children, and not even a piece of gristle or a picture frame will be left.

The house will be nothing but a sun-dried ribcage:
a discarded postcard with the address marked out.

The children will sit and talk of their parents, repressing the abuse and the inability to meet expectations.

The children will work in sterile cubicles, thankful that their hands will not be stamped by calluses, yet knowing their fathers would not approve.

The children will open up the dust-blanketed boxes and stare at old family pictures, not able to recognize the people who smile and have perfect posture.

The children will lay in bed with their spouses and say, to no one in particular,
'Why was it never enough?
What did I do?

Was it me?'

The children will be tortured by these words,
by lives that weren't in technicolor,
by the paranoia of being tolerated instead of liked,
by the anxiety that a paid-off house
and nice car couldn't alleviate,
by themselves.

The children will retire and will have realized that they worked their entire lives just to enjoy ten years.
Their hair follicles will let go of strands and locks,
like a dandelion being stripped by the wind.

The enamel on their teeth will corrode and, before long, they will be thankful for the sensitivity of their teeth because the coldness of senior-citizen-discounted ice cream will be one of the few things they will be able to feel, let alone put a genuine smile on their face.

They will sit on their recliners, stare at their keyboard-kissed fingers and tell themselves the past never happened.

Because that's what tortured people do.

The sky, black as the eyes that stare at it.
Star-studded and as seamless as new programming.
I look down, the streets molested by fluorescent splotches --
red ribbons of memory evaporate from the lights of motorcycles,
gurgling by.

A homeless, pregnant woman, in a bar, once told me,
"Forgiveness is letting a prisoner free, then finding out that you were the prisoner."

The sunset looks like an explosion of emotions
no one understands, yet.

The smudges on her lips
look like the bruises of an orphan apple.

If every red-ripped ****** and perfect ***** meant something, they'd represent all.
The way the alcohol flows and the choreography of women under the night call.

If every smile smothered the defeat in her being,
she'd be less from a fogged mirror memory
and would be seeing
that I love her and the hurricane behind:
I still follow her into the flood,
follow her where bodies intertwine.

The wind whispers shouts and knee scrapes --
And there is something wrong with me
because I wonder of the way the world tapes
every traumatic second onto her hips
and lets it flow into her pale-palmed grip
that grasps my face and the hollow within;
the shallow shake of tomorrow's sin.

Her bed has a garden print,
but I close my eyes and hope
I stand in a Sun-bathed tomato patch,
waiting for the wind to whisk me away.

I have swallowed so much of other's blood that I have forgotten that I have bled, too.
With the world shuffling past,
I have became transfixed with the movements of my idols,
forgetting that my feet have left footprints that have, will, and always be buried under the sedimentary memories that I waited to smother me.

Sometimes I can feel my body buckle under the weight of all the dreams I've dared to dreamt.

Under the moon and on top of the world,
I understand that I am inbetween and will always be.