Failure

I look failure in the eye. For all my searching, I've not been able to find the voice. It's eluded me for so long, and still I can't track it down.

I wonder if the voice is my own creation. I wonder if I've created an impossible case. I wonder if I'm trying to solve the unsolvable, to achieve the impossible. I wonder, and discard the thought like a burned out matchstick.

Rain comes. I hope it will soothe me. The rain is honest. I know rain. I can sheild myself from the cold; admire the beauty of the havoc it wreaks; drink in the thudding symphony of percussion. Yeah, I know rain. When it comes to the rain, I'm all set.

But failure... that I've never been able to deal with. Sure, it happens. But I don't carry it well.

As the whiskey drives me to the floor, I give in to failure.

Tap At My Window

The voice still sings at me, still haunts me.

It's beautiful. The most beautiful thing I've ever heard. And every melodic syllable, every perfect utterance, every emotional outcry, cuts me a little deeper. It's the perfect cut, the perfect pain. There's no blood, there's no scar, but it burns anyway.

I wonder if the voice is inside me. I wander the streets, searching for answers and searching for silence, but it's still there. I close my doors, and it taps at my window. It wills me to let it in.

Fighting it is futile. But I fight it anyway. I fight it because it's all I know. I try to find an emotion I

can't deny, and then deny it anyway.

Emotion. She only lets me down. Emotion has no place here. I know every part of the game, and want no part in it. I want to play to my own rules.

I know the dice are loaded, but I try to play anyway.

Old Stone

The voice eludes me.

I still hear it. It sings to me in the quiet moments; the intimate moments; the moments in which I most crave solitude. It calls to me. My siren song. I don't know what it means, but I can't shake it. Sometimes it whispers absolute truths, sometimes it whispers veiled lives. Sometimes it tells me that poetry is the answer, other times it tells me that poetry is my doom.

Tonight, I try to be stone. Tonight I don't need walls. There's nothing inside me now. I can sit here for years, ten thousand years, and be alone.

But still the voice sings. To be stone isn't enough. I need to be something else. Something warm. Something living. I hang my head: maybe I even need to be something human.

Ghosts

Night falls. With a sickening inevitability the day is veiled; buried; hidden from view. And, for most, peace descends: quiet envelops each moment like a thick mist. Consciousness succumbs to the fog. The lady of the night, in her mercy, hides the horrors of the day.

For most.

For me, the night brings terror. It brings to the surface my deepest fears, my rampant paranoia, my unending rage. My walls, which seem so strong against the hard light of day, crumble against the soft touch of night. Walls are no good here - the deamons are within.

I absently stir a whiskey, hoping once more that it will bring me peace, and watch the ice swim. I hold it to a single candle flame and watch the liquid, the glass, the flame, all glow in a ball of viscous orange light. Radiant, it sends tendrils of light dancing across the glass while whispers of shadow caress and soothe my hand.

Then it happens: the voice appears. A voice I feel I've heard before. It's musical, lyrical, strong, but ethereal - vunerable and sad. It almost soothes me, threatening to put me at ease. I don't know where it comes from. I close my eyes and it gets louder. I pace around the office, trying to find the source between stacks of paperwork and missing person lists. But the voice stays the same.

It whispers that I am a ghost, I am a ghost.

I could blame the whiskey. I could blame the night. All I know is that I've got to find the voice.

My other cases take a back seat for this one. The voice is my only client now.