Dark As Day
The night has never been
The night has never been The night has never been
as dark as the day.
The who , what's, when's,
and watch what you say.
The sad eyes, and fake smiles
you meet along the way.
The memories,
things done in vain.
The noise that numbs the brain!
Stifled feelings,
unheard fear.
The whispers
that you hear so clear.
Illusions and delusions,
added confusions.
The lies, the mistakes!
Who is real and who berates?
Accusations and condemnations,
the overwhelming revelations.
The panic concealed,
reality revealed.
The hate from the loved,
the push when you're shoved.
The fall when you try to fly,
the rise when you wanna die!
The stone cold you have to play,
when all you do is feel all day!
No the night has never been
As dark as day!
Heather Hughes
The merciful end
And so it begins
The final chapter, the last of my sins
As I simmer and boil, and then turn cold
Skin crackling and peeling, I'm losing my mold
It's strange, this feeling that runs through my veins
Burning and chocking, my aching soul it stains
I feel like I'm an observer in this vast space
Waiting for packed trains to come and go
Late and tired, I've lost the race.
Ticket-less and spaceless, I have no home
Drained and passion-less, I no longer wish to belong
Wasted space, wasted breath of life
I guess that's why they say life is an endless strife
The end of the beginning, the beginning of the end
As i'm shapeless and melted
I wish only to nothingness -to- ascend
I'm tired, and frankly have no more strength and will to go on
I just hope it will be better, after i'm gone
Winter Light
Cast upon the snow
Shines a somber light
Soon the moon shall rise
Beckoning the night
Low lies the sun
Weary to the bone
Succumbing to darkness
A stranger to the throne
Steady reigns the umbra
All becoming shadow
Star speckled blackness
Casts a ghostly glow
Clenched by icy fists
A time of plenty quelled
Silence fills the land
Barren and bespelled
The Art of Intuition
Blind folded my senses rise,
To compensate the rest,
A game we play to maximize,
The climax at its crests...
A momentary state of mind,
Of permanent excess,
To hear her closing every blind,
Then taking off her dress...
On my knees I felt the floor,
In places that she's been,
Finding scented lace to lure,
The animal within...
That wanted to be hunted,
And yet needed to be tamed,
By the thing I wanted,
She exposes with no shame...
As she became the scripture,
Of my cognitive ambition,
It framed her naked picture,
As the art of intuition...
Terry
WWW.WhiteLionPoetry.com
Words Have Consequences (Save One Bullet)
My mind was wandering and I was thinking about the upcoming evening with Rick, when one of my students barfed all over her dress and the floor, causing the child next to her to gag and vomit also. Janitor time. I had to call the office and herd the class out of the room until it was cleaned up.
With the two ill kids at the nurse's office and on their way home, and the floor clean, we took our seats again to the tune of, “Man! Did you see Jenny’s puke fly out of her nose?”, “Gross! I can still smell it. Ugh.”, “Do we have to stay here the rest of the day?”
I did open a few windows, despite the below-freezing temperatures, just to let them think the smell was going to get better. It did not.
We were all relieved when the bell for the buses rang. I broke speed limits driving home to get into a hot shower. Scrubbed from head to toe, I warmed up a quick heat-and-eat meal for Brenda and nibbled on celery and carrot sticks before heading back to the hotel for my last rendezvous with Rick before I reluctantly sicced Marcia on him. Be still, my heart! My palms were sweating, and my foot kept slipping off the gas pedal as I shivered all over, thinking of how much letting Rick go was going to cost me. It was making me sick to my stomach thinking of Rick and Marcia together, which reminded me of the vomit in my classroom. Ugh, now my stomach was flipping violently, and I almost had to pull over to the side of the road and open a window.
Fortunately, the nausea passed, and I pulled into the hotel parking lot in time to see a heavy-set woman with frizzy, bleached blonde hair step out of an enormous SUV and stomp toward the hotel entrance. Whoa, someone was in trouble!
I drove around to the back entrance to avoid running into this pissed-off person. Unfortunately, she and I both got into the same elevator, and she pushed the same floor that I had pushed. I tried to not make eye contact by checking my phone the entire trip to the third floor.
When the elevator doors opened up, she flew out, like buckshot from the barrel of a rifle, and pounded down the hallway, in the same direction I happened to be going in. Al, the night desk guy, had warned me about Rick and his angry women. Not wanting to take any chances, I walked to the ice and soda nook around the corner from the elevators, then peeked out just as Miss Angry Pants got to Rick’s door and began banging furiously on it. Holy shit. Too bad I didn’t bring popcorn. This was going to be good.
“You sleazy son of a bitch- open this door or I’ll kick it in,” she shrieked, alerting all the bored travelers on this floor, who opened their doors a crack to get some free drama.
“Jesus, Marybeth. Calm down. What is wrong? Come inside before you get me kicked out of here,” a flustered Rick called out as he pulled her inside the room, with a hurried glance in either direction.
The acoustics from the vending nook weren’t very good, so I crept closer to the room. All right. All right. So I crept right up to the door and put my ear against it. I almost wish I hadn’t.
“You liar! You said I was the only one. Now I have to explain to my husband how I got Chlamydia. How many other women are you sleeping with?” The woman raged.
What I heard next froze my blood. In a mocking, icy tone, Rick replied, “So, you’re a married slut. How do you know you caught something from me? How many other women am I sleeping with? Do you want me to tell you, or do you want to keep living in your little fantasy world?”
Even though I couldn’t see into the room I could feel the woman’s face collapse and the tears running down her cheeks, “I, I’m not a slut. I love you. I’m not sleeping around, damn it. I’m in love with you, Rick!”
“Listen, wherever you picked up your STD, take it back to him and leave me the fuck alone,” he spewed at her viciously. “I’m tired of your whining and crying all the time. We’re adults, Maryanne. We had sex. Period. Do you think I would ever fall in love with someone who looks like you? Come on. Get real. You’re fat, you’re ugly and your pussy is so big I’m afraid I’ll fall in and get lost. Go home to your prickless husband.”
The blood left my face, and I feared I’d faint right there if I didn’t get away before the door opened. I imagined that speech being hurled at me if I annoyed him. You know what? Marcia could have him. Oh, my God. This man had ice in his veins. I ran to the elevator before the woman left his room.
I drove over to Denny’s restaurant to sit and catch my breath before going home. I ordered dinner and thought about the conversation I had just heard through the door. That poor woman. All of us poor women whom Rick had used and fooled. What was wrong with him? Why couldn’t he just get laid without playing games? Millions of men do it every day. It’s not that difficult. The great lengths he went to in pretending to be the good guy and pulling women into his game made no sense.
It was difficult enjoying my hot roast beef sandwich, imagining Rick accusing me of being fat and ugly, and God only knew what he’d say about my vagina when he got tired of me. I shuddered as I choked down my dinner, thinking of the chilling voice he used to make fun of that woman. We meant nothing to him. It was all a game to him to see how many women he could trick into falling in love. It was to feed his ego. Nothing more.
As I paid my bill at the register, I noticed a commotion at the intersection up the street from the hotel. Flashing red lights, police cars, a fire rescue truck, and finally, an ambulance. Wow. Someone was having a worse night than I was.
Hating to drive past accidents and gawking, I was uncomfortable but had to drive that way to get home. As I slowed for the officer directing traffic around the accident, I almost plowed into a police car when I saw who was being loaded into the ambulance. Although her bleached blonde hair was now matted to her skull with clotting blood, I could still tell it was Marybeth, or MaryAnne. Whatever her name was. Certainly, Rick didn’t know and didn’t care.
The Bridge
She sits in a small, Venetian plaza outside of a small, easily passed-by cathedral snuggled in amongst the many larger, unmissable ones. The stool is hard on her bottom, the sun hot on her head. Worse, she is hungry. Not just now hungry, but days hungry. Weeks hungry even, so that her clothes hang loosely over skin drawn tight. It is all, really, that is left of her, hunger; hunger for success, hunger for a companionship which wouldn’t destroy any chance for that success, and the constantly gnawing hunger for food.
Hers in not the busiest plaza, but as with most any other via in Venetia there is a somewhat steady stream of tourists along this one.
And one has stopped. He is looking at her favorite, “The Bridge.” It is so much her favorite that she has only recently begun to bring it with her to show, hoping she might keep it while “living” on the lesser ones, but what she is doing could hardly be called living. If she doesn’t sell something soon then there will be no apartment to return to at the end of the day, and so nowhere to leave it behind, so common sense finally told her that she must offer someone else the opportunity to enjoy it.
It has been a minute, and he is still looking. She is growing uncomfortably anxious, though she tries her best to hide the signs. It is never easy to have a stranger critique your canvassed passions, even silently… especially silently. He does not appear to have the money for such a painting, but he is obviously American. She is told this by his clothes, which are nice enough, but have an odd, frumpy style which is definitely not European. With Americans it is impossible to tell about money. She once dated an American while at university, and one would have never guessed that Kenneth had money, nor where it came from, but he always did. She should have stayed with him, but he had demanded time that she could not give him, just like the others. It wasn’t that she hadn’t loved him, it was just that she loved her art more. Why is it that two loves must always collide?
Despite her reservations she steps from her stool, wandering closer while trying to appear disinterested in his interest, straightening “Il Leone” on it’s easel as she goes, the gnawing in her stomach ever present. Closer, she sees that he is handsome, but his eyes are only for the painting. She thinks to herself that she could take a lover… for a while… one who would feed her. A “patron” might be nice. Some handsome, rich, older friend to make love to her, and to offer her endowments, and to endorse her work to his or her friends?
“It is not the Bridge of Sighs?”
“No.” She answers quickly. Too quickly? Too desperately?
“Every painting of a bridge elsewhere that I see is The Bridge of Sighs.”
”Si. That one sells to tourists.” Her Italian accent is heavy. He is forced to lean towards her to better understand. “I do not paint for tourists." She is not meaning to sound condescending as she says this, but it still sounds a bit so. "I create art.”
”Ah. I see.”
His surety is offensive to her, though she could not have explained why. He is just another stupid-fucking American. What did he know of her? Or of art?
”It has no price," he wonders aloud. "The others are all priced?”
In her anger she had nearly forgotten her hunger… nearly. “It is new. I have not set a price.”
He smiles. "There is a date beneath the artist’s signature. It is not new.”
Fucking Americans, believing they know everything. “It is newly offered for sale.”
”It is a favorite then? Possibly even sentimental? What price would you put on it, were you to price it?”
She did not want him to have it. It was too good for him. “You could not afford it.”
”I paid €26,000 for The Spanish Steps yesterday.”
The heart in her chest stopped its beating. €26’000! What she could do with €26,000!
She did not want to undersell, but too high could be deadly, he might just walk away. Bianca could not afford to let this one walk.
”Well then, you are in luck! This one is only €20,000.” Her conscious screamed at her even as the words flooded out of her mouth, “NO! That is too much!“ But it was done.
He did not run away, as she half expected him to, but pushed his hands down deeper into the pockets of his khaki slacks as he contemplated her price.
”I don’t think so,” he finally replied. “I am looking for The Bridge of Sighs.”
The hungry voice in her head screams at her, "stupid, stupid, stupid!"
Panicking, she counter-offers, her voice weak with desperation, “I might let it go for €17,500?”
He shakes his head. “No. I want The Bridge of Sighs.”
“It is a stupid tourist site.” It was her way of calling him a stupid tourist.
”It is historic, and famous, and besides, an artist should give people what they want.”
”Then she is no longer an artist.” There was venom in her voice. “Then she is a sell-out!”
The stupid American actually smiled at her anger, pissing her off even more. “So now I am a capitalist pig, huh? Well, none of your other paintings has more than €3,000, and you are trying to gouge me for €20,000, so maybe I am a capitalist pig, but I am also the one with the money, and I know what it is I want.”
With that he turns. As he walks away the gnawing in her stomach spreads to her throat, and her cheeks, and her ears. He knows what he wants, and what he wants is not her. “Fuck you!” She roars as he fades into the tourist throng.
The stool remains hard on her bottom, the sun remains hot on her head, the gnawing in her belly remains unchanged. From where she sits The Bridge looks back at her from its easel, shaming her. It is pretty, but certainly no masterpiece.
Perhaps tomorrow she should paint that other bridge...
"Sigh."