So now I am led again to this place,

still with this sad look upon my face.

To this barren place.

nothing grows,

cold and dark, like outer space,

some permanent concrete pose.

So now I am once again in this wilderness,

once again seeking the divine mad holy forgiveness.

In this rocky, dried up land,

neither here not there,

through my hands this shifting sand,

we grow apart, now a silent pair.

Where have you gone my girl, where will we end up, precious pearl, can’t we drink from the same cup?

How much further until we cannot turn back again and find what we have left behind, scattered across the floor like yesterday’s news.

Approaching the end of time, it seems, and no one can see what is written in my heart, to busy blaming and shoving, then comes the yelling and the angry words and you telling me you don’t know me.

There are flashbacks to better times and lighter days when there was some joy to be found in the shape of your eyes, when you smiled and held my hand on the way to the movies.

Now comes the point of no return at the precipice of change and nothing will ever be the same again – again you claim not to know me and I keep reaching as you turn away.

I feel myself getting older and you moving through the time and space that we inhabit and into an unknown void where I am here and you are there and there is nothing left to do or say.

This is not now,

Now is not then,

No one to tell me how,

Silly boys turn into lsot men.

The only time you know is now,

the only yesterday is forgotten,

no one to tell you how,

a branded one so troubled, to me never misbegotten.

There is no one, not one single person who has even tried to understand what it has been like watching you spit in my face and then turn form me and understand how much I still love you and want to reach you.

How about a fuck you to all those who just don’t get it and never will and then we can stop and try to understand each other and how we might be able to go forward from here, from this empty, barren place to a place where we smile at the sun and the rain?

I would rather die than ever see you be hurt and if I was and am the cause of that hurt I would rather die than deny someone I love so much a chance at restitution.

I want one more time when your hand is in mine and we walk happy and when your hair gets in your eyes and you don’t push my hand away when I go to push it back behind your ears.

This was unexpected,

like a pebble in my shoe and a grain of sand in my eye and it is an uncomfortable trying to move forward with you standing still, I will stand an wait outside your door until I am an old man and go to heaven with half my heart just to reach you and then to have you smile like you once did.

There will never be a time when this house is not your home and even the doors that you slam on me will always be unlocked so when you are to tired you can always come home again.

Some mornings when you are on the school yard with your proud swagger and easy bravado I wonder if you see me looking your way and without saying so admiring you and how beautiful you are, with your braided blond hair sometimes with it falling on your shoulders or gently blowing in the wind.

It is no comfort in the moment to be told you are just a teenager and this separation is part of growth and it does no good for me to hear any of that because what is happening here is so much deeper than that, you reject me form a sense of caution and a fear of abandonment and you seek to avoid becuase it is too painful for you to relive.I ma outside looking in like a stranger who you refuse to pretend is even you friend.

I am outside looking in and you cant even pretend that I am a friend and all the while deliver the hardest lessons I have ever learned, just because I want to love you does not mean you will receive it with joy.

All these shades of yesterday,

all this mental and relational tension,

your head full of all that tension that you can’t even mention,

left unsaid, all those things you have chosen not to say.

All these mental snapshots,

hanging in a dusty gallery,

no amount of genuine flattery,

like the silence descended on vacant, unused lots.

Then there are all the other issues,

so often cast aside like used tissues,

always boxed up and never opened,

keep those mental games away and let the blows be softened.

It is no comfort in the moment to hear what others have to say about where I went wrong and what should be done. Though they mean well i cannot see the comfort they propose.

It is no comfort in the moment to hear that you will come back when you are older, sometime far removed from now, no, it makes me angry to have to wait and then sad that no one understands me, no one comprehends how hurtful and devastating it is to me to lose you especially after all I went through to have you in my life.

I always knew the time would come for you to be on your own, I was just unprepared for you to leave me so soon.

3/8 – 3/21/21

T. Deary – P.A.F.M.

Actus auteum malus

The way the lightning passed through the slit in the curtains and sent spindly fingers of light down against the wall – just add it to your busy mind and all the reasons you cant sleep at all.

(…thought again about death and loneliness and the worm and the void and the unspeakable loneliness…(1) )

Then there are all the little voices constantly repeating into your conscious thoughts about all those things you have done and can never leave behind.

(that blood on your hands and those bruises all around.)

Most of them were asleep, dead tired, simply not able to keep their eyes open, he was a bit off on his own and in obvious distress his prayer weas fervent and desperate.

(hardly any of them heard the conversation he was engaged in and no one else would have wanted to be in his place.)

“Do you really believe that you, a mere man, can bear the impossible burden of sin for all men?”

His prayer is repeated and the desperation is increasing, along with the shadows and he begins to bleed, a fraction of what is to come, no way out and those voices come and go.

Then they noticed someone they knew and a large group of unfamiliar men who approached and then took him away.

(He was wounded for our transgressions, he bore our iniquities, treated him as a beggar, a petty thief and then they left him dead, a crown of thorns upon his battered head.)

Today the only things that move at Babi Yar are the blades of grass that slightly sway in the wind.

The cries and fear are no longer heard or felt and the ground non longer moves with the swelling of the bodies put there – shot and left for dead.

All that bloody mess has long ago seeped into the ground and only the wind moves the grass instaed of the bodies murdered decades ago.

(grass fed by the blood of the innocents)

No one saw him well enough to say exactly what he looked like, he blended in so well, so ordinary, surely a misfit.

(perpetual smile on his pudgy face)

Sneaking arond the city and tehn blowing their brains out the side of their heads, blood, glass, lost vision and then dead soon after.

(later, after it was over he told Stacey’s mother that her daughter was a whore)

He even left a note for the police – greeting htem from the gutter- where he was from and where he surely will return again.

When they finally found him no one could believe it was the right person, pudgy and clueless, a perpetual grin on his face, crazy but not insane and clearly excited by all the attention.

Again, in New York, on a December night, he would remember, that there were gragoyles, coming off the side of the building and the weigth of the gun in his pocket, he was sure no one else could see it – he had waited so long and now was his chance.

When the star walked by he even looked at the loser and then he shot him, dead, over and done with, now the loser remains and is still descending into his own madness.

Over a silent canyon ion California, where no one could hear the screamsof those who were dying, here there would be no sympathy, all they had was what they broughtand whats we will take from you.

By the time they were done Sharon and the others were ugly and tarnished, destroyed by violence, drugs, acid trips and psuedo religion – later they found him hiding under a sink, a little man with those crazy eyes.

Those girls were lonely and broken – who could be happy and satisfied selling themselves for twenty dollars at a time?

(I knew some of them and when they smiled you could see that once they may have been staisfied but not now, now they are gone, cut to pieces, and thrown away.)

As the cold wind sweeps the streets of that washed up town, that unreal city, their blood has seeped into the gutters of the streets they walked when they sold sex and skin, no credit, only cash – unless you had some extra heoin to give?

“Well its obvious you dont know where she is” – Karras shrugged – “so obviously you aren’t the devil.” (3)

There is no need to look long and hard for evil – it is right out in the open, coming under the guise of a gentlemanor a beautiful woman hands out and almost never clenched into a fist.

That otherworldly beauty, the one who answers all your prayers and gives and gives and gives till your cup is empty and there is nothing left to fill.

Those trees, the way they come up close and then the limbs come into focus – they could definitely hold my weight, the rope would burn my neck but who would care after it was all said and done?

I would pick a quiet night well lit by the moon and with no wind, I wouldn’t want to sway, just to dangle and thereby give testimony to how small and insignificant I am.

maybe someone would find me quick and then the questions would start.

---

The Nitheful II

“He was capable of being so kind to the children, to have them become fond of him, to bring htem sugar and to thinlk of small details in their daily lives and do things we genuinely admire… And then next to that, in the crematoria smoke, and these children, tomorrow or in a half hour, he is going to send them there, well, that is where the anomaly lay… (Aushwtiz Survivor)

He was handsome and pleasant, always well dressed, whistling Wagnerain melodies, starched shirt and shiny boots.

“Der Zwilling?” he always looked for twins.

Always, never fae away were the chimneys and their constant streams of smoke.

The melodies he whistled were carried away on the smoky air, along with the souls he sent there.

(he himself died years later a haunted, hunted man…)

Behind his back they called him The Pope, living in his huge house, so far from the streets he ruled.

They all said that he was not really one of them, arranging to send people to their death with his words but never getting his hands bloody.

He never so much as blinked an eye, a simple wave of his hand in a particular direction…

Pointing right or left, a nod of his head or a word spoken softly.

He would die, alone, in the streets he lived so far from, a bullet in his head.

He hunted for years, all his victims were young and beautful, years later he said that he was looking for people who should have known better.

He left them mostly in the woods where the animals took what he left behind and he visited periodically until there was nothing left to play with.

(he too was charming and even attractive to some, in the end he could not even control his own tears.)

He was excecuted but, an act of justice, but he was really dead for years already.

No one ever thought it would turn out to be who it was, after his hideden deeds were discovred and brought to light.

He was big for his age but surely no a murderer?

He called it thieving and the night was perfect for it, the night was windy enough to carry the noise away and very dark, no one would even see him.

He broke inot the house and before he left he stabbed multiple people dozens of times before he made his way back home.

(he broke the knife off in her chest.)

He brought what was left of the knife home to remember what he did, up in his attic, he would conjure up memories of how thrilling it was to act like God.

He readily admitted to what he did and when he started confessing it seemed he would never stop and his words sent his father to the restroom to vomit.

The Nitheful hide out in the open and often it is our unwllingness to notice and not just windy nights or smoky air that camoflauges their presence.

I have always been fascinated by reading and learning about true crime stories. I am not obsessed with violence or the power of control. I am obsessed with understanding the motivations of those that society calls evil. Why do some people spend their lives hurting and destroying while others spend their lives building and loving? Also, there is a bit of both in all of us. This is the root of the fascination for me.

I also have a fascination with words and language and how they communicate ideas a feelings. This is the very essence of poetry and writing. A very wise teacher once told me that all literature promotes the author’s view of life. Words and stories and language all have meaning and ultimately try to answer the most primal questions of human nature. All of us want to know why we are here and why we act the way we do.

I recently came across a list of words that are not used much any more. One of the words was “nitheful”. The word refers to evil. I wrote a poem about this whole topic and called it “The Nitheful”. I originally started writing bout things, events and people that were frightening to me and I believe on some level to all people. I plan to continue the them and expand it to other scenes as well.

I do not consider human nature to be evil but the question still hangs in the air – why do some people, human in every way, commit evil acts?

T. S. Deary – P.A.F.M