Please God, Make Me A Stone

I don't feel anything. I'm holding a hand, it's still warm - filled with a rapidly waning life. I don't feel anything. It's not that I don't care. I do. It's just that, well, it's that I'm... detached. I don't care. It's not my problem; not my life, but in a way, it is - only, I can't, I don't know. There is a love, an emotion, a something, and I should feel it.

I am a dragon, hard sleek lines on a dark night. I breathe fire and crash through suburbia taking what I want and leaving behind what's worthless. I'm a corporate climber, ruthless and cunning; planning my moves and crushing my opposition in the almost romantic light of my blazing fury. I am invincible. I. I - that's all there is to it. The Dragon, possibly the most powerful and romanticized beast that there is: the height of power, the peak of evolution; an indestructible, almost omnisciently intelligent, ruthless and very nearly immortal being. I could challenge a titan. I am the height of arrogance.

The hand fidgets. I could... if only, but... I want - I mean, I can't. I really can't, I knew better but I couldn't admit it. So I sit here. Dragons always seem to be lonesome creatures. They don't have allies. They don't have patriotism. They don't feel loss for their dead and dying countrymen. They don't give a damn. I don't give a damn, but that's not what I mean. The warmth in this hand is passing from one world to another, and I don't care - but I know I should, even though I can't. I see two figures: Time and Death, the immutable facts of life. Inevitability. They will push me aside like a fly, they have one thing I don't - understanding. I feel a sense of defeat, or despair. I disappear into another dimension - another time. You can't find me because I have become nothing, the sum of my emotions.

Facade

I'm hiding. Hiding beneath the guise of my insipid nature. Smiles. Laughter. Music. Noise. The smile hurts – they told me when I was young that if I made a face long enough I would be stuck with it. They told me that I should get along with others – that I should be nice; I put a smile on and it stuck just like they said it would. Whenever I go near people I smile, laugh, joke – whatever. The expression stuck because if it didn't they would call me maladjusted. Breathe, maintain the facade.

I keep a gun in the back of a drawer at home. Not to use, but sometimes it's comforting to just take it out late at night and feel the weight of it in my hand. It's behind the neatly stacked pile of lingerie that I keep so that everyone will think that I am hip and comfortable with showing off my figure. Sometimes I imagine shooting myself and how, if I had one, my lover would come in and hold my frail little body as all of the fluids bled out of it onto him and the floor. My detached spectral form would hover over the scene looking on in pleasant silence and realize for the first time that it was more than the fashion statements and the petite figure and ostensibly warm smile that someone was in love with – it was the person beneath. It's about this time that I put the gun back and crawl off to sleep. Because if I did shoot myself no one would come in to hold me. No one would love me. My spirit would wander – forever alone.

Late at night when I can't sleep I sometimes get up and get the gun that I keep in the underwear drawer and just sit there on the bed and hold it. The idea is therapeutic – it's a comfort to just think in the silence of a full moon with a weight in one's hand. Mom, you couldn't love me because I couldn't meet your standards, as hard as I tried. Dad – you abused me, and showed me how terrible the people around me could be. I always see the worst, and try to find good as I do, there is always something waiting to jump out and ruin the image. I've learned very successfully to lie, to tell people that I like them, to go on dates and put on a face. In the end it's always the same though, I find out the worst of everyone, I'm frightened of them; I tell them, we're just not compatible, and then I go home and hold the gun. I remember that nobody cares; but I still keep searching. I want to be wrong; so badly.

At the End

He sat in the chair, gazing across the ocean of piano keys. There is a sound; a single sound, as of the scratching of voices slowly eating through the floorboards. Flashing eons of lights and stars had passed overhead; glowing orbs burned the skin from his bones, but always in silence. Now there was sound! It was like that of a single note, the ominous hum in the pit before the show- the sound of darkness... anticipation. It grows closer, and it splits! A symphonic medley wraps slowly around his toes and begins to climb upwards; it grasps at his calves - picking up speed as it goes. As it climbs through him his blood flows with it, gaining speed, forcing his frail heart to the point of breaking; it pushes past. The ecstasy shoots down his arms in bolts- it is no longer a sound but orchestral movements, convulsions of beauty compacted into mere moments - an indescribable and awesome experience. In a second it is gone, taking him with it to join in the movement - forever.

Ham Sandwich

So there I was, eating a ham sandwich and GOD WAS IT A TERRIBLE SANDWICH but I fucking ate it man I ate it all, bones and everything. Ham sandwiches shouldn't even have bones, but it did; I ate them. But god I don't even know why, and how they stuck into my teeth, shit – all of the bones.

A Highway Man - In Verse

...and into the dark night he silently ducked,
burdened by the ill gained raiments of a thousand broken hearted feminine souls.
As the wind washed through his thick, water darkened curls he let them go,
one by one, into the night. Into the wind
the storm brought them to itself, until the gently raining sky was
wrapped in the warmth of a myriad of kerchiefs, and then they were gone,
lost in the last darkness of the waning night and the rising steam of a fresh new day.

Into the shadowed window he slipped, not troubled by the fey weather
and unheeding of the consequences of his actions.
While thunder pealed and shook the panes of the windows,
he stood over her, watching, as the breath gently slipped
from her breast whilst she rode across the waves of midnight dreams.
Ungloving his hand, he removed from beneath his jacket
a single rosebud.
And placing it on her pillow he is gone.
Lost in the effervescence of the mist enshrouded night.

It had been there when she woke,
an object not of abstract terror or love
but of tranquility, pinned now to her vestments.
Before her a contingent of faces stared,
troubled by her lack of gaiety.
Troubled by her long face, in this time of pleasant reminiscence.
A man's desire for her acquiescence, a dish gone cold before it touched her lips.
Harried, she removed herself from the gathering,
terrified of the direness of her plight.

Up from the street he sprang, calling to a halt the coach.
In a word and an action he freed a brace of pistols, calling to his intentions,
the attentions of the passengers.
Softly he assures the lady patron of his wish for her wellbeing,
whilst still removing from her a scarf and purloining the coin purses of the wealthy.
Gently still he smiles,
a man both roguish and endearing despite his leveled weapons,
and with a nod and a gesture they are on their way again,
dumbstruck by the gentleman brigand.

Beneath thin, twisted and hoary boughs he sleeps,
protected from the hounds by the scent of fresh blossoms and flowing water.
the winds pass by and drape yellow flower-bedecked branches around him,
shielding him from the eyes of the passers-by.
As the sun sets, he starts up, awakened by the call of night,
and leaving, he makes his way to town, followed by dusky eyes.
Silently he stands in a darkened deadened road,
waiting for the lighted windows of those last to bed to fade to black,
and then his work begins.

A silence pervades from under her door,
candles have burned down, and from within she no longer stirs.
He stands, abject from her warm affections,
disinherited from what is his by right.
Into an ill-lit window's dark recesses he steps,
eyes burning white with hate for whatever stalks quietly the streets below.
The cool grip of metal in his hand,
a portent for the coming end and joyful resolution;
to take back that which the terrible creature had so violently stolen away.

She stood 'gainst the night, enshrined in darkness.
At darkened cobbles and moonlit ways she stares,
pining for an answer, a way out; bidding her night-born lover to spirit her away.
He watches her closely, still clad in formal wear,
waiting to see for what she longs so dearly.
Then in the darkness, from without the shadows steps,
the Highwayman.
His pockets laden with other's bits of precious.
A fleeting glimpse and then he's gone.

Baying dogs called through the dells, singing to the hills of their chase.
Through mired plains and overgrown fens they ran,
ever only just behind the man they pursue;
drawn ever onward by the strange and changing scent
of a thousand different perfumes and the plundered goods he left behind.
Through broken gullies and bracken entangled woods,
still they hound him, ever untiring and stalwart in their goal.
In tangles, briers and thorns they race, ever drawn through the treacherous milieu
His last escape: a self-served stroke, a cynic soul fled to rob them yet

Blank pages of a journal flap in the slight breeze from the open balcony door.
Sunlight plays across the room, cast oddly by a mirror searching for an image to reflect.
Iron railings stand dutifully; a symbol of safety only to those who desire it.
She'd leaped past them, plummeting into the depths of time, eyes no longer fixed on fate.
She lay against a background of roses,
writ on her a face - a look of pity and tragedy; a single scarf clutched in her stony grip.
A sad spirit, lost and forever wandering in bracken-tangled woods and dusky twilit plains.