Prompt: You come home one day and check your answering machine. You freeze after the third message.

So I come home and the phone was flashing a little red light. I had unanswered messages. I picked the phone up off the receiver and mashed a few buttons to start the playback functions. It didn't work. Instead, it just took me to a list of ringtones. I tried to leave the list, but instead, it just blasted me with the sounds of an 8-bit MIDI of the Star-Spangled Banner.

I hung up the phone on the receiver to try and fix it. Instead, it switched to a recording of the Tetris theme. As my patience ran short, I pressed a few more buttons. The phone began to blare a sound halfway between a siren and my alarm clock.

A series of grumbled expletives left my mouth and bounced off the loud, disinterested phone. Angrily, I chucked it at the closest wall. The phone changed its tune to some generic heavy metal song. I kicked it across the room. The batteries fell out and the cursed contraption finally switched off.

I recovered the battered phone and the two batteries and began to replace them. Once I did, the little red light began blinking again.

I pushed a few more buttons and found the unanswered messages. The first was about my sister's doctor's appointment.

Uninteresting.

The second was about an overdue library book.

Unimportant.

The third was a call from my mother about how she had left the house to buy a new phone, and that she forgot to leave me a note about it.

I froze, and glared at the phone with disbelief and anger.

The Whisper

Snow frostily blankets the land for miles.
The wind distorts every echo into a whisper:
A whisper of no words;

a whisper of no meaning;

just a sound on the very edge of hearing.

The icy winter air embraces us all.
It seems as if the flame of our fire wants to freeze.
The fire we lit for warmth.
The fire we lit for light.
The fire we lit for our lives.

A dark abyss looms over us.

The sky says nothing, does nothing,
but it waits.

The sky waits for dawn.
We wait for dawn.

Morning, dawn swallows the black.

Winds chill the morning light.
Again comes the whisper,
the whisper of no meaning.
But to us, the whisper is a sound worth hearing.

Redemptive Rain

Gloom and retreat.
Rain drives back all it touches:
every good, every evil.
There are times when havoc is wrought
by terrible, powerful storms.
In the end, though, all is redeemed.
It cleanses the land the way it cleanses our minds:
slowly, steadily.

Let the rain redeem you.
Let it wash away the anguish and the sorrow.

The passion burns away,
but a desire still remains.

The clouds drift away,
and despite the gloom it brings,
we still desire the rain's return.

Insane Asylums and Squids

     Oh dear. Where have I landed myself today? I see walls covered in blood, excrement, and short phrases of desperation. Has someone played a cruel joke on me? Have they trashed and impurified my room?

     Or have I finally been driven to the point of madness? I doubt the latter, but it remains a possibility.

     A few horrific screams rattle the walls. A few people of indeterminable gender cower in the other corners of the room. Distrust fills the air.

     A particularly ugly woman opens the door. "Mealtime!" she shouts in a gruff and masculine voice. Se slides a tray to the center of the room and leaves, locking the door behind her.

     On the tray sit four bowls of a questionable substance. I perceive that it has no more nutritional value that the unsanitary mixture of disgusting miscellany on the walls.

     I do not eat.

     I lose my senses as time passes. We who share these quarters have no window. The variety of people that share their duties of feeding and "rehabilitating" us come at untimely and irregular intervals.

     I seek to keep from growing bored, as boredom can only lead to madness. Instead, I choose to entertain notions of why I found myself in this place.

     ...I find no satisfactory answer on my own. One day, however, I find a paper amongst my possessions. The writing was horrifying. The topic was disturbing. It seemed that I was placed here for writing about insane asylums and squids.

     Oh the lamentable irony. Squids rather bore me.

This poem lacks a title.

Here's a more recent taste of my writing.

I want to see the place
with shattered streets and broken bones.
Don't pamper me with pretty lace
or deafen me in your drone.
Pull me from night
to carry the light,
the light that leads the way,
and bring me all your people who are broken,
battered, and gray.

My loss is of no consequence -
there's nothing I can lose.
Let me help these people
in the way that I so choose.
But if you think perhaps that
I might not do it right,
hold your tongue and save your lung:
I'm in charge tonight.

Mountains

When I initially wrote this poem, it received mixed feedback on it's message and the fact it's written in second person. Metaphorically, though, many people tend to do these things.

You'll climb upon mountains
and fly away home;
You'll dive under oceans
that glisten like chrome;
You'll sigh over failure
and wish you were home.

It's not a big deal
if you make a mistake;

It's never a problem-
you give and you take;
It's never an issue
until your heart breaks.

You'll climb upon mountains
and dive into valleys;
You'll fly over cities
and dive into alleys;
You'll climb upon mountains
and find a new home.

I will be brief.

Here I intend to place writing of varying nature for public viewing. Take everything written hereforth with a grain of salt. Perhaps I will resurrect old works of mine after a process of editing, or perhaps I will leave them in their place, be their place a grave or a pedestal.

-James