Sunday morn, skies that mourned,

wrinkled blankets, undone laundry,

notes that piled, lectures paused,

plates and bowls, last night meals.

Seasons changes, fall and rains,

falling apart, piece by piece.

Save me, please, screamed to the skies,

begged and hurt, lone in a crowd.

Deep inside, something changed,

life felt different, so did I.

What once was, what now is,

what would be, all blurred in one.

Barely human, days all same,

can't be machine, feelings clawed.

Bewitched in a maze, no way out,

dark that stayed, lights that frayed.

Would I leave, this game of hurt,

or would I stay, forever and frail?

Shall I try, when all things fail,

or just let go, as fate may plead?

But I will wake, to another day,

for dawn may break, and the sun may rise,

birds may sing, and the rains may pour,

nights may fall, and the cold may creep.

I will wake to another day.

I sit and I stare at the screen on my desk

and I watch as my friends make their posts;

my thoughts are awash with great story ideas

but for now, they’re elusive as ghosts.

I long for the days when I cavorted on Prose,

and great poetry spilled from my head,

but I bought this new wireless keyboard and mouse

and all the damned batteries are dead!

It is not the rain.

It is not a deep well, or

anything else dark or dank.

It is not ash and flame.

It is green spring with unacknowledged birdsong,

applause for someone staring into space,

flawless sentences misconstrued,

love that doesn’t count.

It is habitual coffee, untasted,

a once-beloved book, unremembered,

a birthday text, unanswered,

perpetually waiting,

untrusted and feared.

At midnight

when

I cannot sleep

and thoughts run

dark

and wild

and deep

and tears

inside

I cannot keep

and death

to me

seems

oh so sweet

as knife-like

pain

tears through

my heart

and rips

and tears

my soul

apart

and fills

the cracks

with angst

and woe

for actions

taken

long ago

I ask

and pray

and beg

and plead

God hear

these words

of them

take heed:

Now I lay me down to sleep

I pray thee lord my soul to keep

If I should die before I wake

I pray thee Lord my soul to take --

which leads

to existential doubt

and many-layered

apprehension

does God exist

or is He just

a figment

of imagination

does it even

really matter

if there is

a something after

if who we are

will never know

what really is

above

below

till we are dust

or ash

or mist

at one

with what

is infinite..

such are

the thoughts

my mind

does weave

at midnight

when

I cannot sleep.

Instead of cucumbers

I place pickles over my eyes

because I prefer to think that self-induced agony

makes me stronger and more resilient.

I am a glutton for punishment,

so, I lay back and let the brine work its way in.

Never wincing—Never offering a single reaction to its burn,

but my retinas are on fire.

The cohesion of pickle juice and natural saline

works its way toward my brain

like a starving parasite eating its last meal.

I welcome this torture

because I find comfort in pain

and already know the sting will fade away in time,

or, I’ll just become too numb to feel it.

After all, pain is more familiar than love,

which for me is like love,

because it’s always there for me even when I never need it.

I deeply appreciate its loyalty and commitment,

and though it’s not reciprocated, it’s unconditional.

I light a candle to unwind.

A flickering flame soothes my unrest.

Lavender releases from the wax prison it was held in,

but still, I prefer the Sulphur of a match

over a deceased flower’s final excrement

because the aroma of hell is how I relax.

Dead Flowers and hell. They’re both the same anyways, right?

Everything revolves around death and ends in death.

Even while the oil bleeds out of an unsuspecting aromatic herb,

its beautiful aroma is squeezed from its last breath.

So, everything is resolved in death.

There is only one place for us in the end. For me, it’s hell.

So, I decided to get there sooner by living in one.

I wonder if they can make a candle that smells like hell.

Do you think they can extract the essence of a decaying body

and place it in a wax jar like they did that Lavandula?

I flip on a tune,

to set the mood with my favorite soundscape—

A waterfall crashing into a rainforest.

Now that’s a sound I can drown myself in.

It spills down from three thousand feet above

and smothers me like I'm being waterboarded by nature.

How interesting that water gives life, yet can so easily take it away.

Angel Falls is not my guardian protector,

but it is a fallen angel I must protect and guard

because she lifts me up closer to heaven than I’ve ever been,

then drops me back down to earth where I guess I belong. For now.

I place a warm rag over my face to simulate the Amazonian climate,

Then turn on the faucet to full blast

so, I can practice how to breathe.

No gills mean there is a struggle,

but a struggle is what I crave.

With every gulp of oxygen I lose, my existence fades,

and I start to appreciate all the small things a little more.

Who knew being closer to death,

helps you love life a little better?

Why can’t I just get there on my own instead of forcing it?

Am I fucked up for living this way,

or is living this way how I fuck?

The timer blares a turbulent cry,

and my deprivation is complete.

While the tank opens to birth me back into reality,

I can’t help but wonder,

If I am reflecting on thoughts of death because I want it,

or if it’s how I cope with knowing the fate of humanity.

The salty bath I floated in slides off me like water repels oil,

like cheaters repel love.

and like humans repel humans.

I rinse off my secret thoughts in the shower,

dry off self-hatred with a towel,

then put on a costume of lies so I may enter the world,

and on the way out I schedule another visit

to my torture spa.

I can’t wait to live again,

next month.

I don't usually tell folks about my own private Hell, and I had no intention of doing so here, despite the invitation, but a second invitation from LilEnigma has also arisen--something about vulnerability... about trust. What kind of horrible things have we donein our lives--which kind of lends itself to a type of private Hell. So why not? I'd often heard about "the gates of Hell," but I always figured the term to be sort of... fantastical. As it turns out, there actually is a gate to Hell just outside of Poughkeepsie.

Poughkeepsie-- all my life, I'd never known, or considered, for that matter, how to spell it. Strange though, the moment you see it, you know how to pronounce it, regardless of its many letters, and regardless of how one might think it would be spelled. I got stuck staring at it-- Poughkeepsie. I stared at it so long that there developed little faint white rings on some of the keys of my otherwise black keyboard--a tell-tale sign of someone who has found one of the gates.

There's divided highway east of town called Haight Avenue, which turns into Manchester Road coming through Arlington-- three lanes of traffic headed either direction. Officially, it's simply, Highway 55. About three miles east, you can take an exit onto a plain, two-lane road, Old Manchester Road, which immediately turns into Titusville Road beginning at the bridge over Wappinger Creek, then leads south into, you guessed it... Titusville.

The gate of Hell, to which I refer, is located almost exactly halfway across the 181-foot bridge over Wappinger Creek. In June of 2016, I stood on the edge of that bridge and decided to jump.

I did not. Instead, my phone rang, and it was someone saying they wanted to publish my book. The gates of Hell would have to wait.

Telling you about the gate is the easy part. I've done that so many times that it's begun to become numb. No, the intriguing part of this exercise is the vulnerability... the trust. So, let's try this.

In 2012, Kendall was 17, Ashley was 9, and their mother would harm me physically if I revealed her age at the time. Danielle. Danni. I had recently published (self-published) The Second Rape of Doctor Emily Pershing. Life was good-- damn good. Our family had been on a quest, seeking out information regarding Danni's birth mother, as she had been adopted as an infant and had decided to find out as much as possible about her past. We found out a lot. A lot.

The love was thick, heavy, wonderful. The proverbial cup had runneth over. We decided to share the story-- share the love, so to speak. Danni, Kendall, and I shared as much as we could remember, and the majority of it was handed down from Danni's mother, and a beautiful friend whom we desperately wished we could meet. The crux of this thing-- the book-- was that sacrifices were made in order to give Danni life, and in turn, give life to her daughters, creating every beautiful thing which filled the cup.

As much as I wanted to believe the story was well-prepared and researched and presented, I have come to accept that there is something missing. The reviews have been as exceptional as they have been rare. To my knowledge, fewer than ten people have ever read the thing. Call it what you will, the simple fact is... it's a failure.

On March 4, 2016, Danni's impossibly adorable brother, Percy, had treated the girls to a road trip to visit my parents, who had moved to New York for reasons that I still cannot fathom. One of our family quirks was that, whenever we saw something while traveling which made any of us wonder, "What is that?" or "Where does that road go?" we'd head off to solve the puzzle. I imagine, someone must have thought, "Why do they call it 'Manchester Road?'" Then they convinced Uncle Percy to exit on Old Manchester Road, to confirm whether or not Manchester truly existed.

A moving truck lost a wheel-- an entire wheel-- while crossing westbound on the bridge over Wappinger Creek, causing the driver to lose control and cross over into the eastbound lane. Percy, Danni, 21-year-old Kendall, and 13-year-old Ashley were hit, head-on, bouncing their minivan up and over the guard rail and into the creek, killing everyone inside.

My heart damn near chokes me when I think about how I used to joke that life was going to suck when Ashley turned thirteen. I thought she'd be such a tremendous pain-in-the-butt, so head-strong and argumentative. I thought she'd be impossible.

She wasn't. She wasn't. Dear God in Heaven, she was absolutely perfect!

I've found salt formations to be remarkably resilient. How they last under constant abuse is beyond me. The only thing which seems to break them down, other than some type of cleaning agent which I haven't the heart to employ, is the very thing which created them. And here I am, having once again, added more droplets, which will eventually dry, the salt crystalizing, reinforcing the little white rings.

The publisher who called about the book was complete BS-- wanted me to spend hundreds of dollars to have them redesign the cover, proofread it, and put absolutely zero effort into advertising it anywhere other than where it's already easily found... and that's the hard part: the vulnerability. Sacrifices were made, lives were uprooted, hell, lives were lost in order to ensure just the possibility of Danni's existence. Her life was made possible, Danni's children's lives were made possible, and I was, by far, the greatest beneficiary of those lives... and now they're gone. All there is, to demonstrate the awesome selflessness of the people and the extraordinary beauty of the sacrifices made, is this story--my contribution, my effort-- and as I stood on the edge of that bridge and stared into mouth of the gates of Hell, it was my greatest, most profound and contemptible regret, in this cruel life, to have known that in that effort, I had failed them. All of them. It's as if none of them were ever here.

And neither am I.

I learned the horrors of prescience at the very moment I discovered I was gifted with it.

She was a childhood friend, a year younger. There happened to be a pause in our rambunctious play, a pause just long enough, and our play just close enough, that we accidentally found ourselves looking into one another’s eyes. Being children, the staring itself became the game; exploring each other’s souls inside them, daring ourselves to venture deeper while at the same time being revealed. We passed that point where one laughs to hide their discomfort, or looks away, and we continued even longer, her winded breath so close that I could feel it on my chin, and on my moistened lips. It was then that I saw who she really and truly was, and she me. And it was then that I knew.

“You are going to die.” I whispered.

“I know.”

“What will you do?”

She answered the only way a child could answer when the question is so fearsome as death. “Hide.”

When I left her that day I never saw my childhood friend again.

“Robert?” My mother called from the foyer. “Alicia’s parents can’t find her. Do you know where she is?”

“No Momma,” I lied.

But it did find her, even where we had so carefully hidden her; inside that big old trunk down in her basement, covered between the musty old clothes and things, the heavy cedar top closed and latched.

There’d been death in my friend’s eyes that day. There is no hiding from that.

These hands, she fills them.

Delicate china,

held by the bull.

Hummingbird feathers

and hollow scrimshaw

decorate the labyrinth,

But she remains unbroken,

bending, instead,

lifting, pulling, pushing us

ever skyward.

The burden too heavy,

clouds too far,

slipping grips and crushing

weights, I fell and I'm fallen.

She moves up,

she moves on,

and I mourn.

I will welcome my Theseus.

Magic holy burning ardent flame—

Behold the restless fury pouring skies,

To breathe the fearful glory can’t be tamed,

Like nightmares, wild horses song on high.

A haunting song in terror, beauty, life,

Beyond all questions, depth intangible—

To silent screams the whispers echo blithe

In radiant curses blest implacable.

Passionate spirit burst from heavy chains,

Unleashed from shackles: spirits breaking free,

In darker shadows sharp from blazing veins,

To lurkers shrinking back in frightful glee.

Unrestrained the savage demon leer,

Inferno paramount of love and fear.

There are so many people in here but not enough room,

there is an empty trash can too, but no trash bags or a broom.

Someone put their coke cans in the sink

and now the small room begins to stink.

I hear an awful song in my head that appears to be stuck on repeat

and I'll be damned- someone just turned up the heat!

It's hot and humid and spiders are crawling up the wall

I do not like this room so much, I'm not fond of it at all.

There are bingo numbers never called and cake that's never made

As I come to realize this, my smile begins to fade.

Sitting next to a talkative Know-it-all

I get what I believe is a spam robo call-

All of this has happened before my day even begins,

I cannot help but wonder what fresh hell I'm in.