Some previous work.

I usually write in a very metaphoric, poetic style. I can, however, tone my writing in any way needed. I can make it painfully obvious or shallow. Whatever is needed to fit the style of the project and bring out the personality of characters. (This sounds so unprofessional.) Without further ado, here they are.

SHE, SOFT AND ALONE

Tearing at the walls again, nighttime just beyond the windows, nostalgia just past that. She, the girl that matters until pretty girls slide by. She, the girl made of other people's smiles and the sounds made after rain. These walls have tasted paint and words and angry drawings of old friends and now they're drab with checkered wallpaper, so she rips and pulls until the canvas is free again and ready for the wind of desperation and collusion to pull it on to deeper waters.
"Let go!" These are the words she screams to hear words screamed. Advice to herself or everyone else or the lonely, empty night that kicks outside. Advice to shake the humiliation and the futility, the unreality and to replace it or to leave the puncture bloody and untouched.
"Let go!" She screams to God and all his angels or to Satan who won't stop just because you ask. She had a father and he left for the blink of city neon and the fly buzz of dying lights, dead coffee meant for passing truckers, cold, foreign beds. He sends letters in invisible ink. He sends matches and scraps from magazines because she always loved to write. She has a box to hide the bits of him in. She says when it fills it'll be winter and she'll burn the last of her father to keep herself warm. She says a lot of things.
Today she cut her fingers. It was an accident, but she laughed like it was something she had always known would happen. There are parts of her, way down inside, that whisper that she's cracking up and falling to pieces. The other parts, the kindly parts, defend her with the logic that there's no one anywhere to sweep her up again. She mustn't let her mind slip now, not all alone.
She wasn't always all alone. The blue eyed boy had been someone to talk to. He had talked, smiled, felt of love for months and he had made her happy where she'd never been happy before. She told him that she was just another girl. He had never believed her. He had a mind that wasn't made of lust and puppet strings and he would say such things about her! Then the pale-blond-perfect-kissing-wink-smiling-beneath-eyes-as-bright-as-daylight girl arrived and tore him endless worlds away. Though it ached to wake and know this, she will not blame the blue eyed boy. She can't say why.
"Let go." She whispers to the stubborn walls that mock in silent challenge. They say I dare you to carve me raw with anger. I dare you to color me regretful and abused. I dare you to do anything more than waste this empty night beneath numb blankets. Shake me-make me human!
And so she pulls the night around her, sketching stars and home made fables, etching old remembered poems and new tragedies, gently, deftly painting all the things she's left behind until the walls are tapestries of sorrowings. Solemn, she salutes her work of truth with quiet tears, fingers outstretched to touch the darkest, softest bits she hides inside.
With the dawning of a blood red sun comes the dying of the light within and so, used, deserted, unholy, she allows her eyes to close and thoughts to die.


HERE

They trawled the empty spaces, nets of blazing fire flung behind them as if they thought somehow they could run away. A metal box of astronauts sent reeling through the cold, forever midnight of a hopeful, somehow unfriendly, somehow menacing sky. They were lost in an endless maze of fizzing, boiling lights that hung on strands of godthread, and they were alone.
They ran with nowhere to run to, echoing past dead, empty shells of suns in their silent, filtered rocket, their protection from the cold. They survived on whispers of dreams about a place to call home, a place to rest, a place to feel safe in. They spoke of cool, rich waters casting dancing patterns into a pouring sky, and of fruit, and of smiling, and of closing weary eyes in some far empty field, and of falling asleep.
Days were a shuffling of feet in the low light and the cool air and the susurrus of great metal things in motion. Days were whispered conversations, hiding in the endless maze of cold, ebony corridors, watching stars die in explosions of power and light to become great, hungry holes that ate away the sky. Nights were for a desperate and unpronounced slumber.
They moved as a bullet, spiraling, cutting deep into the flesh of night. Eyes bled tears like sap as they sat alone and shivering in faux nighttime darkness. Somewhere there was light and warmth and something to hold on to. Somewhere there was hope and air to breathe in deeply. Somewhere there was laughter and innocence and a comfortable, lulling ignorance of all the terrible and lonely things. Somewhere there was life. Here was only hollow and confused.


THE HEART THAT BEATS FOR LOVE IS SURELY BROKEN

His fingers jumped and curled, uncurled and twisted in his pockets. Inside he was a million Chernobyls, a frenzy, an irradiated fear that choked and blew apart all his simple hopes and prides. He did not want to believe this was all he had. There was no choice here, only judgment to be passed.
"I would die for you." He did not feel that he believed those words. He was only a little thing, a soft thing to be spent and used and toyed with until there wasn't any life within.
"Yes, you will." She said it like it was no more than a remark about the weather.
"Am I a joke to you? I have come so very far for you. I have done such things as would choke a man to tears and I have given of myself until I could not breath, for you."
"Oh?" She said. "And what have you done to reach me here?"
He slumped a little, remembering. "I passed through the holy places in which I saw such things as ought never to be seen. I held a fallen star in my hand and wept as it begged of me to kill it." He slid his hands from his pockets, showed her his fingers as if presenting all his pain to her. "I cut pieces of myself away as passage on the river barge. The river was the voices of all my lost loves (none as exquisite as you) that said I was their death and that I never loved them.
"I stood beside the mirror that is your door and saw within myself to all the things I am but do not want to be. I was afraid, but I passed through the mirror and I am here for you."
"I see. Would you have me lay beside you in my bed or do you want me here?"
His eyebrows creased and the frenzy within was static and noise. Air seemed never to have hung inside this room. He choked a word as if it were his last. "What?"
In short sentences, as if the sickness was an obvious thing, she explained all his choices, all that she would do for him before he went back home. He was an empty room inside and a ravaged one at that, all tattered walls and mildew window stains. His stomach swam with this new knowledge and the truth that she had no need for love. He went to her then and ruined himself with her and he tried to forget in the heat and the noise why he'd come here.
He dressed and left then and, on leaving, broke the mirror to pieces. Taking the largest shard he cut a hole within himself and, reaching in, cut away the heart that used to beat to the sound of her name.


THE JUGGLER

In the window, juggling. And again the grin hung on his chin like half moons never waning. He was a tall thing, and in the window billowed. His hair swinging 'cross his face, eyes blink-blinking, never leaving the sight of his hands. The sun seemed somehow caught within the warping of the glass balls, 3 or 5 or more, that orbited, revolved, somersaulted, catapulted up and back between his tempered fingers.
"He'll drop them!" whispered little things with cotton candy mouths and caramel fingers.
"They'll stay!" reassured warm and gentle grandpas, grandmas and anyone who knew the ways life was those pure and weathered glass balls.
The juggler was light entombed and caged by ribs and gristle. The juggler was springs and spars and candle wax still molten from the heat of summer towns in summer places. The juggler was childhood removed from distant shelves, dusted, repainted, made to stand in open places for the children to enjoy and for the aged to remember. The juggler was life and in the small towns baked of dust and pure intentions he was alive as nothing was alive.
And as the children's eyes were filled with this new, endless glory, as grandmothers squeezed withered hands of old husbands with the thrill of childhood fervor, the juggler lifted his green eyes and dropped his burden, crashing. Balls, small, glass, fragile, hollow rolled and spun and with the sound of midnight tearing, cracked and fell to pieces upon striking that foreign earth. Everything sung silence and, for a moment, there was nothing but the wide eyes of the juggler. Were you there, you would have felt his stare move through you, past you, on to something distant and apart from this memory of a town, this skeleton.
And so the whole crowd turned, all windblown, leaf quake, whisper sounds, to gaze upon the juggler's fixation. And it was she, the silent, pale, autumn girl that no one ever really knew, wrapped in the cloths of youth, with eyes that threw the world into perception. She, the falling leaves too early for this summer town, she the paper thin (and paper sharp) gales of Autumn sputtering and dying, blew away the watching crowds until only two remained: the juggler and the autumn girl.
She came to him then, and they both knelt in the dead summer grass and gathered all the lonely shards, the sun still locked within them, quivering.
"I'm sorry," she said, and her voice was tides in tempests or rain on metal rooftops.
"Never." He spoke a little too soft, caught his tongue and coughed.
"I'll help you put them back together," she said.
And with a mouth still waxing half moon (now only just a little nervous) he said "thank you."

Down the street, behind the grocery store, all bent around the corner, was the juggler's audience, watching still. A man, all wrinkled fingers, milky eyes and missing teeth, bent close to his dear, ancient wife, and whispered "that's exactly how we met, love."
Wrinkled, penciled eyebrows flared and buckled as the laugh-line, cotton, aged woman replied "you silly thing! You never juggled!"
The old man chuckled. "I juggled, of a sort. And I was good, until I saw you, dearest."


THE CITY

The mindless pulse of city lights, the crackle-buzz of city neon, the dry slime cockroach city sidewalk and he, the fitful city breath. Above, the sky is swallowed by the endless exhalation, city teeth in row on row that house the sleepless, city people. It seems he was coughed up upon these streets to walk the city night all drown full of city solitude. It seems these city spires form a cage and so he paces, maybe waiting for the city lights to jump and die in sprays of blood.
He walks the sidewalk like a treadmill, feeling nothing, sliding dumbly past cold delis and all night churches where the holy never stood. He feels that there are stars somewhere above him and all around the dead and ghastly lights of a shell shocked mausoleum. Beggars cry for quarters, whores for dollars. He fancies neither, for he is here for walking all alone and he is here for touching city cobwebs and for crying city tears.
Police sirens wail symphonic and he tilts his ears to catch each sorrowed note. He's here for the show, for the truth that always fouls up city lies. The city can't be bottled like ships or rain to sip on when the days ought to be lonely, should be anything but calm and circumspect.
The city is a drug for all the junkies walking all alone, an addiction never filled but always sublime. The city is a pit of every sadness ever known and so those looking to be solitary tread the filthy sidewalks searching for the emptiness inside. Not to fill it but to feel it and to know that it is delicate, exquisite, intense.
He walks the city streets, caught up in some dark rhapsody of city voices, breathing shallow breaths that snake up to the silent, unseen stars.


FEELS NOTHING

Walking. Legs churning, roiling with each increase in speed, hopelessly kept in second place by a racing mind. Everything he sees spins tapes in his head of year old memory of a girl with a beautiful dream. "Exquisite" he called her, and in his ignorance he had also called her human. These thoughts lead to sick, reedy laughter and another increase of speed.
His heart beats the rat-tat-tat of soldiers gone to war and he wishes it would just shut up. Everyone says without thinking that the heart is where emotions hide and stir up their concoctions to serve as party favors. That isn't true. He could cut his heart out, squeeze it 'til it burst and he'd still love her. Limp, life swallowed, blood slowed to dust, dead, he'd still love her. He can't stop it, never could.
He looks up at low, dull clouds, feels the air of quiet neighborhoods, feels the late summer herb garden thickness of the air, feels, for only a moment, the way he used to feel when he was smaller and his smiles were because he was happy. He tastes the tears before they fall, perhaps in passing. He's almost running now, and his legs don't feel like anything.
She riled up his days for months, so that the air feels thicker now without her. She was his moon and stars, his dreaming and his waking, his fears and hopes, and now she is his sadness. He can feel the wound tear and grow, festering with sores and the slow searing of nerves. He feels like a tourist here, in the hometown he never left, feels used up, feels old.
Maybe I could jump in front of that car, he thinks, maybe I could stop it then. Dead or not, he'd always love her. He'd never told her that. The words paraded in his head, waving bright banners, trumpets wailing, every time he saw her, touched her with his eyes. His tongue was not the sort to pay attention to his brain and it always found a separate set of words to speak instead. And so it was she thought he'd found another that could fill his heart, his head, his life the way she had.
He rushes full speed now, legs pumping the sidewalk past green yards and sprinklers and dusty gravel driveways, cold gray clouds and swinging rocking chairs on porches. He feels the daylight breath thin, feels it bleed it's very last, feels the night pull it away to hide it from the eyes of children. He feels snow, tastes cranberry sauce, smells caramel on homemade popcorn. He closes his eyes and movies swell up to project themselves on his eyelids. Movies about girls and love and a happy ever after that is the saddest science fiction ever shown.
Eyes shut, he feels the sidewalk stop beneath him, feels his feet hit highway asphalt, feels the breeze of speeding cars feels the sound of fists on horns feels the heat of headlights feels the road scream as wheels brake feels the caress of a front bumper feels nothing. Feels nothing.

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So. There you have them.