Love Is a curious thing. Sometimes it barrels into you, leaves you breathless. Other times, it comes in- to your life, a tentative beam of morning sun sneaking through the blinds, and you think this light isn't possible. The shutters are drawn. Night should linger on. I don't feel like waking. Yet the room comes slowly lit. Sleep slithers away, and at last you can no longer deny the dawning.

empty and closed, hovering in some frozen netherworld neither sun nor rain could thaw.

But then, my entire life is bullshit. The best things in it have vanished, ghosts. Ghosts I'll admit I created.

Grown up? Me? I suppose I have. Killing things, and almost killing myself, must have changed me some, after all.

When You Weren’t Looking The child became a woman, though she wasn’t ready to. Don’t ask how or why. Those questions are not important ones. Can’t you see you didn’t care enough to notice?

Ghosts Take shape under moonlight, materialize in dreams. Shadows. Silhouettes of what is no more. But ghosts don't bother me. The day brings bigger things to worry about than flimsy remains of yesterday. No, spooks don't scare me. Gauzy apparitions might prank your psyche or agitate your nightmares, but lacking flesh and blood they are powerless to hurt you-cannot hope to inflict the kind of damage that real, live people do.

crawling up into daddy's lap when dad was still DADDY nodding my head against his chest soaking in the comfort of his heart LISTENING to the thump...thump somewhere beneath muscle and breastbone I remember his arms their sublime ENCIRCLING and the shawdow of his voice "I love you, little girl. Put away your bad dreams. Daddy's here" I put them away, Until Daddy became my nightmare that one that came HOME from work everyday and instead of picking me up, chased me far far away