He balled the letter up tightly and squeezed it, letting the angry pained tears run down his cheeks. All his life, his sister had never told him why she was such an angry person. Now, he knew after reading the Dear John letter why his sister left when he was a baby. He tossed the paper to his side and stood, letting the realization hit him like a tidal wave. From afar, the key clicked and the door opened. His dad's voice reverbed down the hallway but he heard nothing. Just the click of his dad's Glock and his angry footsteps.

Obscurity always knows how to steal joy,

Sucking it in like a vacuum of despair,

Planting kisses of death on any plan made.

Starting with the littlest aspects of life,

Dampening them with drenching acid rain,

Depression reigns supreme over my head.

Torrential tsunamis of push and pull,

Insanity versus sanity, if you deign believe

Either is on a separate, cleaner coin.

Whether there's a cleaner coin, mentally arises,

As I flip the shiny token of "joy" on knuckles

Bruised from beating the shit out of life.

Yet, every night, as I undo Mayweather's laces,

I look up to the sky and beg God to give me

A sign and let a star shine through for luck.

After years of slipping through fingers

That clutched so tight, half-moons

Outlined desperate and sweaty palms,

I saw him again, in the wild, not long ago,

And my heart stopped.

The heat in my body radiated like lava,

Melting every resolved feeling, thawing

All those tears I had frozen long ago,

Which threatened to burst right there.

My fingertips sucked the blood back

To my crazed heart that leaks cracks

Like the spiderwebs that held trash

For so long after he left me in the dirt.

And there he was again.

A new body, a new smile, a new life,

Yet still no ring on his left finger.

No surprise Mr. No Commitment could

Change everything about himself

After walking into a sea of death,

Cleansing his soul in the navy blue water

Outside his broken hometown and rising

To the challenge to help girls like me.

His first, or maybe his last, I'd like to think

I stayed on his mind until his dying breath,

Until God showed me that beautiful smile

As he waved and walked back into the sea.

But, he's back and will never be mine again.

Poetry is best created

After the moment passes

And you breathe.

In.

Out.

Air flows through you,

Brushing your hair softly,

Reminding you gently,

Though the trees fall

And the oxygen gets low,

Manna still falls at night.

My traditions lie like a forest after a fire,

Cracking and black and unfruitful.

The life that once chattered and sang

Whether the sun shone bright above

Or stars twinkled to their tunes

Scurried off to protect themselves,

Leaving the house vicitm to the elements.

Despite seeing the world around me,

The Mayans may have struck bigger

Than any Gregorian or Julian calendar

Ever dreams since it still stands, evidence

Of the union of arithmetic and faith

Raising nature to work for society

Yet never bend to break under pressures.

How I wish nature raised me like Tarzan

(Maybe with thirty-percemt less racism),

So the smoldering trees and blackened soil

Would not ignite such fear and pain and pining

For better days that feel uncertain

Despite the gleam on the horizon.

As the story goes, the ancestors came in boats,

Severed the cord and spilled the blood

Of the children of the earth centuries ago

And used the red earth to make brick for houses,

Roads, infrastructure, indoor plumbing,

Washing machines and ovens, things we thank

The Heavens and kiss God's feet for, and laugh

That we could not live without these blessed items

Built by pioneering pillagers' slaves and children

Of the land stolen and violated and trampled.

Winter lie on the horizon, and the chill wraps us.

Lying on the warm ground, savoring the embers,

I dream of a day again when the vibrant forest

Lives and sings and dances once again.

Lord, I ask for aid with this prompt. I can only think to compare it to writing a personal prayer on a chalkboard. I've only said the scripted prayers before in public, the Hail Marys and such, that you memorize and sit next to the National Anthem and the Pledge of Allegiance. I can't possibly speak how I do in private with You. I can't cry the tears or sing the praises that one only loses themselves in in Your presence. But, to tell You the truth, there is one little thing bothering me. Confessional is a little sacrilegious, right?

Embers crackling,

My fingers slipping,

Letting the gas can

Clamour to my side.

Our memories simmer

Under heaps of kindling.

Keys, wallet, cell phone

Brown hair, pleading eyes

It all goes up in flames.

Chia's heart pounded in her chest as the officer's slow steps approached the Cadillac. She held the pale squirming baby tightly in her arms. She could see Artie's charcoal hands gripping the steering wheel. The officer shined the bright bluish-white light in their faces.

"Where you coloreds going?" He grumbled.

"Missus want us to take her and the babe into Baltimore to see her husband."

The cop looked in the backsest where the little Italian woman was curled over onto herself, deep in a fitful sleep. The police officer tapped on the window but the woman scarcely stirred.

"Please, suh," Artie said.

"Shut up, boy." The officer was jouned by another one now who was shining a bright light at Chia and making the baby cry. "Why ain't she wakin up?"

"She deaf, suh. Deaf and dumb since she a lilun."

The first officer looked at the woman, the baby, then the pair of black people in the front seat. He made a face and peered at his partner, who shrugged.

"Your tail light is out," the officer said. Breaking glass was heard. "Fix it."

The pair of officers left, and Chia sighed.

"Did I do good?" Angelica asked.

"Perfect."

Bubbling to the surface, I feel the tension rising far too late to stop it. The foaming of the love-drunk, confused, hurt heart that hits a scar on a snag and remembers all over again the initial cut. Ms. Crow may have pined that the first cut is the deepest, but the madness that infects it hurts the worst. The anguish of blindness towards every lover as my fingers atumble to decipher the Braille of what he's done now. There are never words gentle enough or precise enough to explain that this is the little transgression that pushed Montresor over the edge and made him kick down a wall in an abandoned cellar for his dearly beloved, Fortunato. There is never a good time to reveal the skeletons of stillborn loves in my closet, killed because the lungs couldnt form or the heart didn't beat or the brain didn't develop fast enough for me.

This burgeoning bud is the closest I've gotten to loving anything so genuinely in years, since the last implantation nearly tore me in two when it was ripped out. I now fret over every quickening, not sure if they are butterflies or the early warning signs of a miscarriage. He's too far to assuage any doubts and most remedies are just placebos for the looming question I used to whisper into dandelions before blowing away the seeds and germinating everything in the nearby vicinity with a spreading virus. Love me, love me not. Love me. Love me not. Love me. Get this mass of feelings that can quickly turn into a gasp of sobs or a burst of uncontrollable hot anger and hold it tightly. Love me not. Uproot yourself and walk like a mangrove tree before the seed has enough time to wrap its fibrous roots around you and forces you to be part of its growing process.

Winter is coming, a time when madness gets harder. Dandelion seeds spread by the broken-spirited start to pick and bloom and fight for a place. Viciously and savagely cutting others off like you hear in songs. Misery Business is the work of a dandelion, taught from birth how it's a weed no one wants, and how it will strangle anyone it's near. But I've gone Rogue and tried it anyway, allowed myself to be vulnerable, and got the Angel's wings cut off. Now I sit alone in the wilderness, waiting for the night to be over, wondering if you'll come back again and keep coming back the next day and the one after, or if I've overstepped some unseen boundary and lost another one.

Better sipped like fine wine, we butcher poetry like college kids desperate to get drunk. Heavy-handed, clunky, and telling lines full of red-ink like in third grade when the form is first unfurled like a fragile baby revealed to its older siblings who longed for it, cared for it and spoke to it softly through the mother's belly. Neither had any idea the torment it would be put through, how poetry would beae scars inflicted upon it by hurt and jealous hearts that pine for love, long for death, and dream of suicide. Left in the most random places, naked, for all to see. From bathroom stalls to spitballed Bostonian pavements, poetry is dropped and forgotten by its maker, who just needed to scream a few lines. There are no edits. There is no technique. Only the too few connoiseurs who still sip their wine and wrap up cozily with poetry and perform careful vivisections of every detail to get the picture. With patience and poise, these few still run their eyes along the wrinkled fabric of emotions and paint an image as they smooth out the edges, pressing and steaming and wiggling, to create a tapestry out of the coil of words they weaved together.