I am embittered into a darkness not of my choosing. I write and paint and eat my way further into its crust, the darkness. Harder rind lay ahead. I bear my axe at solemn stone walls, head cocked to bear these long front teeth to stone like a Guinea into a many-carrot diamond surface, lusting after the pain for the sight of highest value incarnated, impossible to ignore, for I am the creature that claws and gnaws. I have no other tool, no alternate love, nothing other upon which to project my Quixotic hopeless romanticism, my nihilism, my truthful honest bid at nothingness if this love cannot be had, consumed. And it consumes me. Like a deepening hunger that gets so hungry it feeds itself with its own wanting bread that weighs heavy in the belly of all love beggars and cowards. Temporary fires burn hot and consume their coals, these sockets, my eyes, blackened and left barren of any vision of a future. They saw only once, as was their fate; to burn so brightly as to eat the very vision they beheld. No paper woman of blood and skin, no matter how unblemished stands against such intensity for long. She burns up. Tinged at every edge by black charcoal, reminded of hurting. It hurts me, no matter how blinded and hungry to know her. To know her pain. My senses feel it, feel her, and the ‘if only’ in her heart that keeps a small flutter of hope for its princely counterpart that might dare her to pound again. I have no touch, no taste, no sight. Only this rage at my own fallen downness and it somehow retains a meter, a measuring device that hears her flutter -a sense beyond sensing- the only single thing I can claim to know for sure. Hope in the midst of hell, where I sit each day, soaked in teary flames of my own sparking, pouring my soul onto already charred paper in terrible apology, able only to do more damage by my very nature. A confused and honestly innocent rhino in a China shop, horns aflare but only by necessary accident and meaning no malice. Shave off this god forsaken remnant. It makes me who I am, and I hate every inch of this stubborn and useless protuberance; made only for war when there are no good wars left for the fighting, no noble deeds to be done, and not a lover for whom to sacrifice or after whom to name a city, having conquered. It is surely a god damned thing, to be this animal.