Mad props to my first
BFF who kicked its ass,
Mad props to my second
Who will do it also.

Why are my friends getting cancer diagnoses?

Real life sometimes rips my heart from my chest.

No one noticed Charlie these days anyhow.  His eyes naturally spilled down onto the floor, very rarely looking up to check that he might be en route to crashing into someone.  He was a fish fighting the current of pedestrian traffic, and as it happened every time he walked through the crowded sidewalks, other people moved aside without noticing him, even ever so slightly.

At the ticket booth, Charlie stopped, and stood in front of its glass, staring at the chipped blue fingernails of the woman working the register.  Her fingers poked spastically on her clacking keys, with the bustle of chaotic rooster claws, while she cackled over her shoulder at the girl working the register two windows down.  “Bawk, squeal, did you hear what she did then?” she went on, as everyone did, not seeing Charlie.

“Bawk, that girl went cackle cackle squawk squawk and I just don’t know that she was thinking at all!” Charlie’s eyes lifted in confusion at the woman’s words, settling at her ruby colored mouth and lipstick stained teeth.  Words tumbled out of her throat, over her teeth, and past her lips.  Guttural cawing flung itself from beyond the fleshy conical stalactite in the back of her throat as she went on with emphatic movements ,  “Cockadoodle, yes she did, can you believe it?” The chicken woman, realizing her gossip had been served to a man standing before her, turned her face to him.  Without waiting for him to tell her his destination, she forced a ticket into his hands, and demanded, “Eleven peckles.”

Charlie’s hand, of its own volition, reached into his pocket, pulled out a few bills, and handed them to the woman.  She took his money, folded it into the drawer of the register, and promptly set to clacking her claws against the register keys, cackling away at anybody but Charlie.

It’s not predestination.
There is no “MUST” in suffering.
Simply prescience and
The hope I would remember
What I was thinking
Before I was born.

Please let this mood leave me soon, I have shot bile darts for weeks now.

“Just listen to this song,” he said.
And I laid back on the bed.
Herbal Essences and dirty sheets, I breathed in the confidence to recover from the first bitter taste of lost love.  A revenge so rich that I never had the opportunity to witness if it made its mark or not.

It was every ounce of life’s pain and beauty pouring from the twenty disc player, “blessed are the shallow for depth they’ll never find.”

More than a decade later, I watch the rise and fall of this piece within my soul and realize it was the music that saved me.