Submissions by AudibleBlink

You don't know who you really are until you're walking in the city, in the crowd, in the rain.

Early July - there were eight of us, together and alone, footstep-by-footstep in tandem, our finish line only at the other end of the street. Our finish line, the twenty-story Hilton shining with its fresh coat of water, a mercurial pillar against the bright grey sky.

The rain collided in drumbeat on our cheap plastic ponchos, the mischievous wetness still reaching in when we moved our arms. Our shoes were soaked, but there wasn't any bitterness to the rain; we laughed about it,...

It's not unorthodox by any means
To dream of things quite far beyond your reach
Perhaps your soul could show you how it leans
Revealing you don't practice what you preach

A static city, made of wax and dust
That totters gently on the edge of life
Could be refreshing, if I'm being just
But not quite so for those under the knife
What is it in the human mind that asks
If we are geared more wholly to the rough
Though we, content to bear the oft-spoke 'mask',
Refuse to chew the meat when it gets tough?
A wild want will grow within my heart...

I have seen the silence
Of the city's coat of snow
And I have heard the grasses
Through the sidewalk try to grow

I have walked the alleys
As the chatter fell to rest
And I have seen the nightly winds
And felt them in my chest

I have passed the bayside
And weeks ago I stalled
As ripples chased each other
To the edges of the wall

And I remember thinking
'What a luxury today
With all the fears of old resolved,
To sit and watch the bay.'

A stone is thick, a mountain ever more,

And carvéd is the latter from the core

Of our green earth - it stands to reason, then,

That it should crumble and return again.

A venom is our time, and by its grip

Your peerless beauty and its kind shall rip

Alike my soul, and dash it all to dust.

Though strong and wilful now, we all will rust.

However, as I gaze up from its base,

The mountain seems to age at its own pace,

So monstrously large it stands apart

From our quick time, and this I keep to heart....

A gun may be a gun, and yet,
A bayonet's a bayonet.

When fire rages through the night
And doesn't cease, come morning light,
The primal fear of loss of life
Cuts in much deeper than a knife.
And as the clouds shift o'er the glow,
Unaware of flames below,
Briefly let the sun to shine
Across the broken forest-line.

A heart may be a heart, and yet,
A bayonet's a bayonet.

Lack of sleep and burdened mind
Eyes that now refuse to shine
The darkness was a welcome shield
Until the morning sun revealed
A problem solved, a...