WORDCHASM

I run
Striving to reach an unseen finish line.
Drenched with effort, drained, aching,
I race ahead, the beat of my heart reassuring me I am almost there-
I will be happy soon.
Running, I am full of cold, consuming hatred,
Bleeding sweat and bitter tears of impotent rage,
Knowing I am disappearing, paying the highest price
For a crown of vapor.
I can [...]

Bartholomew’s Place
The man cradles his little boy in his arms.
Looks at the boy’s long lashes that shield eyes of a gas-flame blue that match his own.
Bartholomew.
Looks out the window at the night sky, lost in thought.
Lost.
Stroking the child’s blond wisps tenderly,
He wanders to parallel worlds,
To a place where he is, where Anne is.
There, it rains [...]

I exist.
I know it
Because I feel pain
The agony as I kill myself.
The luxurious curves are cut away
No more nonsense, I tell myself unmercifully
Wielding the evil knife shaped like an endless clock.
I become limited, beauty-less, shapeless, frill-less
I get smaller, thinner, transparent
As the excess layers fall
To planes and angles.
Cut, cut, cut,
Dying.
Go on,
Shave the head
Glory is a farce [...]

Outer evil is brilliant light
Compared to the inner darkness that cloaks
My soul with heartlessness.
Men are pawns,
I am their hollow King.
Beauty was meant to be effaced,
Graffiti was made for the whitest walls.
Come close and fear not,
There is nothing to worry about
Except for the fundamental difference
That lies beneath our identical faces.
You live, and I am dead.

I know you better than you know yourself.
I know why you think the way you do,
I know what makes you tick.
You would not believe the truth.
Ask me, when there is nothing left.
Come to me and I will help you draw the blade against your wrists.
Watch the smoke and the black blood pour.
Then morning will [...]

There is a road,
a one lane road
(come)
that is paved with ruby blood.
I have walked it already
and am waiting for you.
It’s length is ten years,
ages of exorcism
(hell)
And the darkness of light,
where your best friends will be
Fear, Fury, Chaos, Void,
(love you)
the drowning of the dangerous
silence that threatens your peaceful
(torture)
existence.
Cover your eyes against the
dancing beauty
(venom)
and feel it strip [...]

As you walk along the shore,
Take the dissonant seventh to the major key.
Let the resolution
Stand with tiny Emma, the killings, the laughter, the weddings.
Through them you can clearly see the pure distant horizon
When you lift
Your eyes from the depths
And look across the stormy ocean,
Believing that you can and will walk on the water.
Live as though [...]

by Brijida Prano
At the funeral
You see me in black.
I let you think I am mourning the dead.
But the dead are dead-
I lament the love
That never once had the chance to blossom.
Don’t think I shun you.
I love you, I just
Avoid the pain of trusting you fully.
Don’t cry for me yet
At this long, long wake,
Expecting of me [...]

by Brijida Prano
Ice, perpetual Winter.
In the Treasure Chest, the object lay
Suffocating, unacknowledged, dying, frozen.
The horizon held no hope.
Inside Earth’s blazing core,
In the cool blue skies that embraced it,
The Temperature Regulator saw visions-
Time was quickly running out.
Moved by deep compassion,
Regulator breathed warm, hopeful winds,
Thawing the frost, slowly reviving the object.
Regulator watched, smiling.
It moved, breathed, slowly blossomed,
But [...]

I hate you.
Why must you love who you do,
Tormenting me cruelly by loving
Someone forever out of my reach?
You take what I love
And fling it mercilessly away,
Your musical, eternal venom ensuring it will never return.
Yet you are the only one I can always turn to in my despair.
Because you try to drown me,
I desperately need you [...]

Noah
Dedication: For Wesley
Noah and Livvy were married five years, three months, and seventeen days on the day the doctor told Noah he had at best six months to live. It was not the first time he’d heard this- he had not been content with the first medical opinion, or the second, or the third. This [...]

Lessons
Show me how to forgive
When all that’s left is the wait,
How to live
When there’s neither pain nor faith,
But ice.
Show me how to dream
When my dove returns with no olive branches,
How to breathe
When there are no more promises,
But pride.
Show me how to be free
When I can no longer sing,
How to love
When I can hold on to [...]

by Brijida Prano

He saw her from afar.
She was nothing exceptional to look at,
Not a head-turner by conventional standards.
He could only see her dimly,
An incandescent light shining in his gray world.
The scales over his eyes prevented him from discerning her features,
But he could see more deeply than [...]

by Brijida Prano
Vanishing
With a few strokes of my white sword,
I transformed the future and changed the destiny of lives unknown.
My love for you is mingled with the white blood of my weapon.
It lies in shreds on the floor,
Slain, wiped off the face of the white earth.
But I, its killer, never spoke,
So you never knew it [...]

by Brijida Prano
Déjà vu
When you were here,
The weather was dreary, biting cold, rainy.
The wet wind stung me like a thousand needles.
I thought of you.
I saw the gray sky, majestically fierce in its darkness.
Its turbulence mirrored my thoughts.
The asperity of my wool sweater disagreed with my skin,
While I inhaled the gracious scent of dead leaves and [...]

by Brijida Prano
Life Drain
Every day, every moment that trickled down
From the faucet of her life
She died, drop by drop.
Reflected in the pristine azure of each droplet of time
Were the visions of her heart.
Before her eyes a new droplet was being born
Out of life’s silver source.
She shrunk from this one, not knowing, not understanding
Why.
Obscurity.
Disappeared, meshed, melted [...]