Submissions by CruelHandedWriter (Jamie Rhodes)

She stares at me,
but I choose the walls:
The cold, featureless walls
that expect nothing
and can take nothing.

Maybe just a little skin
from my knuckles.
Nothing that I need
or that I can't retrieve.

...

I am learning a craft
that everything is part of:
Indecency, lust and bruises
Allies, enemies and alcohol
Music, literature and madness.

It is all essential
to the process.

As is everything else.

They deal in hatred
-often well disguised.
Religion impregnated
the extremists.
Then the fingers
really started pointing.

No one is left
without being chastised.
Immigration knocked up
national pride.

Everyone is waiting;
glaring at each other.
We are all dogs
being cattle prodded
with hatred
until our leashes snap.

What a circus it will be,
even more so than now.
More so than ever.

I am both sad
and excited:
If it takes so much
-a moment of finality,
of bloodshed
and horror-...

I remember him well:
Sick of walking around,
accompanied by a dozen voices
-inside.

Sick of laying in an unmade bed,
in a dirty vest
-alone.

Sick of watching them walk away
as he held his head in one hand,
steadying his nerves with whatever
was in the other.

He was sick of their sights,
their conversations
and their gestures.
Their hands and feet
sickened him also.

Even the ones he liked to watch;
The ones he undressed
behind a quizzical brow:
They all eventually made him sick.

One day he...

JESUS CHRIST," I yelled,
"GET OUT OF HERE."
And, with that I hurled my empty glass
against the wall and was left alone.

I've been reading too much
of one man, I thought.
But, watching the glass break
and then the fear;
it felt good.

I have been too kind
-on the surface,
I surrounded myself
with people so that I wasn't alone.
But, I was lonely. -I still am.

Life is stripped away
when you engage with the dead
and that is what they are
-most of them.

At face value
they can appear...