Guidelines: Include a short sample of your writing (250 words or less).

If I take you there, you must promise not to stare. Like the rocky cliff above which we now stand, my inner depths were riven long ago. I did not act as a thief in procuring this benumbing grief. It came the way it comes to every man. We’re at the bottom of the chasm now, it’s not much farther, just around this bend. He wants me to tell you, he came not to mince but to mend. Alas, multifarious forces came; they smothered, pierced, and reversed the climax of his youth. When he got hurt, he became silent. There, just over there, is where I laid him. The rocky slab which now bears his body is kinder than the fetters his family offered him in life. Not many know of this dark hollow. I know he would like it though. In life he could never get close enough to the wind and rain. Here the nights are unending and the days are just grey. A plaintive howl caroms off the wet rock, longing to express some unknown ill. It’s odd how our breath is reflected in death. When it escaped, the final breathy note of Siberia’s incumbent wiped his presence from their very memories. 

(1985, Lakeside Dr.)

A baby blue pram rolls over tarred lines and fractured pavements. Two wrens fly by in a playful skirmish. A middle-aged mailman places bills in a skinny mailbox. Come close, in the pram cast your stare. Crazy. I’ve taken you, but he’s no longer there.