I don’t feel hunger anymore. All there is is the headache. It crescendos at noon when the sun peaks through the crack in the outer side of the cell and falls upon my face, and usually subdues only hours before I fade into sleep.

I don’t dream much anymore. At least not at night. If i do, all I remember are whispers and screams. Long gone are the narratives my mind used to spin in the quiet hours before dawn.

When the bed gets too hot

I run in the woods

In hopes that when I return

My mind will be tired enough

And my soul returned to its raw state

So that dreams can reignite the fire

The walking enigma,

The paradox,

The riddle of our youth.

For how can a fire,

in the blizzard,

possibly be anything but the truth.

the stars were the water on the pavement

when you entered my dreams

the theif drank them all

to gain the hearts of our heroes past

and now pisses on us all from the heavens

while we continue to sit on the cold ground

The last time I felt the rain, I was huddled under the abandoned garage in a beach chair, one with two pockets on the side for your beers. You laughed as I ran back and forth into the puddles forming on the cracked concrete of the driveway, not caring that I was barefoot and that your belly was starting to peek through your shirt.

I used to hate that, people who wouldn't go anywhere without shoes. I remember burying my feet in the sand of the islands not too far from here, ones where we would go every summer. The rain felt even more real there. I played games of drip drip drop with the sky and my sisters until you would call me inside to watch the sun drip into the horizon from your view on the recliner. You said it was melting like my favorite popsicle. None of the other kids liked the orange popsicles.

I wasn't like the other ones, and I remember being mad that you treated them the same as me. I guess I should see the viture of that now, but I remember being alone at the age of nine while locked in the coat closet with a bloody lip and bruised knees and thinking: I'm melting away and you don't care.

The other ones laughed at me after that. I sat in my mushroom chair with a book in my lap, squinting at the whipping wind and branches from the storm while you got high off the generator's gas as you kept us alive. I decided to use candles anyway, maybe to spite you? You treated the girl from the mountains the same as you did the boy of the sea. Don't you realize that I looked at you differently than they did?

Now they're all gone, and with them you as well. I ride my bike past the rebuilt house, the ashes of which that served as the colosseum in which I fought the others for you. I threw out the beach chair along with the mosaic of the barefoot man when you left. I figured if one was to die the other had to go with it.

I don't know if I killed the boy that day. I had killed you, and now its hard for me to remember the last time I felt the rain. You shroud the summer days with a mist that can still make me perspirate in fear. A fear that every barefoot memory of you might be wrong, and that you were the one who killed the boy in the first place.

You are not a stoic.

Indifference fits you like the medium sized t-shirt on the depressed teen: too snug in some areas and completely loose in the others.

I am the one person you can not fool.

Trust me, I have been indifferent. I went through life as a spector. Neither a morning nor a night person, although I was only awake for the night. It's when the world becomes silent and seems to give you the respect that only a fragment of god deserves.

Don't let the night fool you.

You feel it. So intensely it aches your bones and clouds your vision. Don't you notice when people ask you what color your eyes are? It's because they seem to be...smoky. As if the fire that burns you goes ignored and has has climbed from your heart to your head.

That fire is the enemy.

You must not kill this enemy. You must negotiate with it. Accept its existence, and make it accept yours. A duality exists within you, Reclaimant. A violence who's only wish is to bring peace to the world.

Clear your mind, Pastkiller. For you are not a stoic.