Rapids

Poetry

Demands that I spit on the page and describe dark eyes as something

With all the likeness of a black hole, not oil, because there is no light.

There is no sheen, no glitter, just unfathomable lightlessness.

While a simple, unobtrusive little

Story

Will demand that I forget the elegance and inhale suffering instead.

It demands that I avoid the description in favor of something else.

What good is a man's likeness to a so-full-it's-empty gravity pit

When I could be stabbing him through the center with his

Failures.

The novel demands that I look at both, that I dissolve his being,

Shred him until he cannot move and then drag his corpse

To an imaginary finish line and take a nice ride

In the whitewater rapids of his cool, crisp

Tears.