Chillin like a villain what does that mean?A corpse in a body bag at the morgue?

Did he deserve it?

Did he wear a mask to hide his strewed identity.?

Who is he?

Halloween night,hunter and gatherer.Sorting the sweet from the sour.

Visiting swanky cribs.

Like taking candy from a baby.

After that night every night was the same.

Mask up,hit the street.

This time it wasn't ritzy neighborhoods.

And he lost his sweet tooth,now he had fangs and a 45.

It all started when he was a child,when he first looked in the mirror in his mask.

He didn't see the ugliness anymore.

He noticed his eyes for the first time.

His deformity wasn't on display anymore.

He actually seen beauty in that mask.

He grew up in a rich neighborhood.

He was considered a freak.

Nobody would make eye contact with him.

Until he put on that mask.

Doors and closed eyes started opening.

He felt valued for the first time.

But that day he knocked on the wrong door.

He should of turned and walked away like the other times.

This time he wasn't welcomed with a smile.

The blackened end smoked out its last ebbs of wood. The candle flickered in the background, but the bitterness between us soured the air. She gave me the match to light up the ancestral lantern, but all I wanted to do was to stab its dead flame into her arms. Lighting the ceremonial ancestral lanterns is a custom of our culture, but this honor felt degrading. What was marriage worth if it was not settled over physical confrontations?

When we first met, she was looking for her friend at a cafe. She made the mistake of running late to their meeting, and her friend was already halfway gone without telling her. She was not the type of friend you want around, but she had no choice but to stuck with her only friend left. I caught her attention by shifting close to her and asking about how stressed she looked. Her entire body jolted when I spoke, and it was later on they I learned that relationships have never been easy on her physically either. Perhaps it was this guardedness that wrapped her view on relationships.

Her black hair fell down to her waist, and her eyes were the coldest blue there was. It should have been a warning sign, but no warmth could have convinced me that I was making a wrong decision. She wanted to leave me behind the moment we talked, and it took a good half hour before she relented and gave me her number. She wasn’t pleased with me, so I expected a random person on the other side, but to much misfortune, she answered. d

The flame lit up only when she started to imagine what a good life it would be to marry a surgeon. No more career work—just be a stay at home mom. Her interest in me exponentially increased when she became aware. She wanted a family at the most minimal cost her lavish lifestyle. I thought meeting her expectations would be in the true warmth forward underneath it all.

We engaged, and when the day came, I always threw up due to anxiety. No one interrupted our ceremony, but some days, I wished some random homeless guy just ruined it all. It would have given me enough time to reconsider. Loneliness may have been more preferable than this.

In our culture, it is looked down upon to divorce, and even as the flames died so quickly and her smile became more cruel as we discovered there was no hope for kids, we stuck along with each other. I was the stale bubblegum stuck on then bottom of the school desks. I took the burnt match and smelled the dead essence. I twisted it with my hands, threw in the grass, and wished the lantern of the dead carried me away.

Please don't shout at me.The velocity of your words travel so mind numbingly fast in one ear and out the other.

The other what?

The other organ?

Speak your mind.Speak what matters

Mind over matter?

What's in between. That's what matters.

It's hard to read battered lips when the tears in your own eyes make it hard to comprehend the pain.

Listen with your heart.

“I think I’ll retire now”

Said the atrophied old man

His ancient voice all husked grain and shattered glass

As those telltale words

Crept from his mouth’s gossamer canyon

For he was at war with time’s decimating beasts

Whose phantom jaws dug violent fires

Beneath his wizened flesh sheets

All fare for grief’s conquering fathoms

Skinned soul deep

And so he collected his dust blanketed books

And bandaged his groaning fingers

Exhausted from the year’s tombstone pace

Kept awake each night by his coffin dry coughs

Which rattled like bloody thunder

Leaking from each black balloon lung

Ready to pop

For the buzzards

Under stained glass stars

Like hungry sparks peeking behind sullen nights

Thus decided he that this year was a draw

In that it bloodied his fists

But still taught him to crawl

And he was pleased with such bruised sentiment

And stepped bent but forward towards bald funeral sky

Drinking long the last few drops

Of sinking lemon sun

His bronzed goblet now retired

For he had outrun the devil

With final leathery foot steps

Tattooing sacred victories onto unleavened ground

That even a universe of horned tragedies couldn’t erase

So his last day on earth was one hell of a party

And now he was home.

My hands hold a book nearly 500 years old

My fingers brush my classmate’s

As he slides that book into my palm

His hand is warm but not soft against mine

As I cradle that book

I turn the butterfly wing pages

And look at a note in the margins

Written by a hand not unlike mine

Or his

I wonder how many hands have cradled this spine in the same way I am now

How many fingers have traced these pages

How many eyes have scanned this note

How many have asked these same questions

As this book slid into their hands