once, when he was critically young, he saw something so stunningly sordid that it burned its way into his heart and killed a part of it, and of the rest of it that fought to beat and to bleed, within that it laid its eggs so that they would hatch and it could burrow deep into the fibers, into the muscles of his being, and turn his thoughts, and turn his thoughts, and turn his thoughts.

at first thereafter, in the days that followed, he was stunned and emotionally scalded, like he had lived through the napalming of his soul, so that like the vietnamese girl in that picture, running naked on the road in tears, he felt like he was running before everyone spiritually naked, seared and stained in shame, overwhelmed by what he had seen, and then felt, and then felt possessed by. but as the intensity of the experience receded in time, the seeds within fed on his fears and faults, so that over the years, the trauma became the tranquilizer, and what was lost on that day ran far, far away into the night, into the space of unclaimed things, where innocence and hope flee when a spirit is severed- into the space where what he had hoped for as a child, and then as a youth, and then as an adult disappeared, leaving behind only insecurity and disgrace and the constant turning in, and the delirium of delusions and despondency.

on that day, though, whatever seminal images of love and the way a man should be with a woman that He had put in him were twisted and choked until he could no longer see them as they were crafted, and instead, the spawn took over his hopes and his passions and his pursuits, consuming them like a cancer, sowing sickness wherever it spread. and while the boy became a man and wandered into an adulthood of emotional emaciation and social starvation, he worked hard to look fine on the outside.

he worked hard to look good and nice and pleasant to the world, while inside he fed the demon, stumbled in darkness, and tried to feel something. he tried to hear the little boy locked in the dungeon, hidden in the dense thicket in the center of the midnight forest, listening for his cries, for his yelps, hoping he was still alive, hoping in him there might be found some hope, some innocence, some life- a possible space for something real, something tender, something clean, something alive, something in the arms of another, whole and healthy- that he might be lovable yet- outside of his senseless stupor. and for some reason, even though he searched for years and could not hear or see or find the boy, in long watches of the night when the scars on his soul ached and his mind convulsed from his flights of toxic fantasy, he still stopped, and once and a while, when the demon slept, he prayed.