“After healing I’ll run back to her – of course this poem demands a brutal ending!”

Love is a job doer and a man slayer. Both equally efficient, until the taste of it is most felt on the cold side of the ribs.

There’s not much I know about forgetting. By which I mean I can hear her name from a distance; and it still breathes cold in my chest.

Respect pain. Every heartfelt word is first born from sadness.

I’m a drunk poet; and I guess maybe I sipped too much of what I couldn’t buy of her.

I held my breath underwater and felt surrender in my lungs; maybe this too counts as love.

And when the cold comes, I swear I can feel her in my bones.

Today I can see the cracks on the wall they’re visible; but I can tell they are finding their way to soil, And so am I.

Maybe water is not entirely lost when soaked into sand. Maybe it finds a better resting place to call home; and I hope she did too.

All through the depression, I was the soft toy in the hands of a baby with sharp teeth.

It is my dying wish to travel around the world; to feel this hurt in a slightly different way!

Sometimes even in pain we smile to the world until we think we’re dying.

The broken worlds we hide inside; that’s how we start to die!

Most days missing her is my only choice between death and dying.

Often times the language is different; by which I mean, I love her, and it’s the only stammer I’ve ever known.

I’ve seen it, I know it too; love still dances in the fire after the rescue.

I forget how our story started; but these days I’m finding the missing pieces behind every exhale, where I left the words standing with sore feet.

I’ve got a new friend, all right. But what a gamble friendship is! Charlotte is fierce, brutal, scheming, bloodthirsty-everything I don’t like. How can I learn to like her, even though she is pretty and, of course, clever?

The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose

In England, the system is benign and the people are hostile. In America, the people are friendlyand the system is brutal!

Our country’s national crime is lynching. It is not the creature of an hour, the sudden outburst of uncontrolled fury, or the unspeakable brutality of an insane mob.

But that citizen’s perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.

I do a level 18 on the elliptical at four miles an hour for 20 minutes. That’s 360 calories. I want to see someone else try that. The resistance factor at 18 is brutal. No one goes to 20.

Sometimes all it takes to help someone survive anything brutal are those six words: ‘None of it was your fault.

But I was brutal and violent in a way they tell women not to be.