Her preciousness, her wings of solitude that have given me no rest. Her streets are hard and unwilling, her blood as thick as violence. I have not taken a step or fallen without her pulling the strings attached. I am but a weary traveler on her desolation. She knows not comfort, only pain, separation, chaos and anger. Her disease, it spreads to every living thing. Among the fire bushes, in the gutters, this red sickness, this isolation, this infected righteousness, this selfishness. And she pulls me inward, coercing me, stroking my manhood while beguiling my thoughts as if this hell is heaven, as if this prison is a promise.

I pull away, her nails dig deeper. She is a jezebel, she is filth, she is undeniable, she is my utmost desire. I long to flee her grasp but my thoughts make sense of the day so I can live with the deception of the night. And when he comes, he is a fever, he is ejaculate riddled with specs of blood. If his sister is the cruel yet deceiving day, he is the bastard of the eternal night. I love his sinister affection, but my body excretes the effects of his bullet time.

I've walked through that valley, in that shadow of that death. I have feared no evil. That rod and that staff continue to comfort me and cover the wounds of this Gomorrah, this inhospitality. I vomited this truth and saw what my stomach kept for itself. I saw those bile words, those fluids, the love ingested, the pain held inside. They were a mirage of a thanksgiving dinner, my intestines the sweet ham, the bile fluids were the gravy and I ate it with delight. Strange is it now how we can consume ourselves and then, when the dawn breaks and we see our reflection, we fail to realize that the best parts of us are missing because they were given away.

But the dawn breaks harshly, her peace doesn't come without a fight as the bastard struggles to keep the sun from giving life to the lifeless.

Illuminate! We are illuminate, we are recreate, we are salivate, we are deception, we are a city without walls, we are crucify, we are primate. We are life without living, we have dreamt without dreams. We are nothing, we are hostility, we are murderers, we are rapists, we are the darkness that wants to strip away the blue in the sky and call it our own. We are detestable.

J.M. Prater

La Sonadora

How peaceful her passing, how delicate that fragile earth beneath her forever folded wings. I had seen her over and over, resting there in that coffin, a dmily lit corridor in nowhere. I stopped, capturing her image, giving her an emotional burial and thanking her for her flight. The days continued to pass and her body lay there still, hidden, silenced. How beautiful the world for such a creature to live and die without notice. I with her, she with me, we are one. I should be so brave as to pass through this world with such peace.

J.M. Prater