The Dark Thing

Something's thumping in my ears like thunder,
but it couldn't be my heart.
My heart's a million miles down
where soul and body part.
I might toss in a line to see what I can catch,
but this thing sounds dark and toothy
when it growls like a wretch.
At night it throws itself against my chest
and peers out through green eyes.
I think I'll let it be for now,
though it's eating me alive.

"What's the answer, he wondered, walking through the library, putting out the lights, putting out the lights, putting out the lights, is it all in the whorls on our thumbs and fingers? Why are some people all grasshopper fiddlings, scrapings, all antennae shivering, one big ganglion eternally knotting, slip-knotting, square-knotting themselves? They stoke a furnace all their lives, sweat their lips, shine their eyes and start it all in the crib. Caesar's lean and hungry friends. They eat the dark, who only stand and breathe."

Something Wicked This Way Comes / Ray Bradbury

A Young Writer's Prayer

Lord, you know me better than I know myself. If I should retreat suddenly from a swarm of buzzing voices to put ink on paper in a frenzy, I do so because it lights my soul on fire. I know only that I must love and write, but I know these things with ferocious certainty. Make my pen like the sword of the Maid, that I may cut down with words the enemies of light. Amen.

Eddie

The days melt away to beautiful music.
She wraps herself like a cloud of smoke around my cranium,
well acquainted with regret.

"Towards midnight the rain ceased and the clouds drifted away, so that the sky was scattered once more with the incredible lamps of stars."

Lord of the Flies / William Golding

"He saw himself in her eyes, suspended in two shining drops of bright water, himself dark and tiny, in fine detail, the lines about his mouth, everything there, as if her eyes were two miraculous bits of violet amber that might capture and hold him intact."

Fahrenheit 451 / Ray Bradbury