Agawaer

The sun was setting. I tried not to look at it. Looking at it only reminded me that I shouldn’t still be here, shouldn’t still be sitting on this bench in the park waiting for someone who should have arrived hours ago. What had I done wrong? The question kept bouncing around my head as I searched, over and over, for an answer I knew I’d never find. I’d never know why I spent this whole day alone—the one day a year, aside from Christmas, where you shouldn’t have to be alone—and that was the worst part of all. Had I done something to upset her? Said the wrong thing? I racked my brain in search of an

There’s a mansion on Royal Street you should avoid, A place that some argue we should have destroyed. I’ll tell you of how all of this came to be, I’ll tell of the curse of Delphine LaLaurie. The house drips with evil, its gardens attainted, Its floorboards and walls with bright blood once were painted, And yet, my dear children, you also should know, That at its inception the house wasn’t so. Delphine, growing up, was surrounded by riches, She wore the best clothes with elaborate stitches, She built a fine mansion with wide, graceful halls, And threw lavish dinners and masquerade balls. So pretty and charming and

Apophis strode with chilling calm through the mud-churned shell-ridden hell of no-man's-land. Here and there an errant blaze still cast palls of smoke into the dark gray sky, and the dead--still unburied--lay rotting where they'd fallen. It was carnage at its most horrific. The smell, the sight of it was enough to drive any normal man to madness. But Apophis was not normal. And he was not a man. The dead of this war were beyond counting. An entire generation of young men had died in the most squalid conditions, fighting and killing each other for mere yards of war-churned muck, fighting for generals who viewed them as expendable and kings w

I don’t normally make a habit of demolishing media articles—if I tried to refute every single piece of hyperbolic superfluous tripe that gets put out every hour of every day, I’d never have time to do anything else. But every now and again I run across an article so asinine, so jaw-droppingly idiotic and so childishly infantile that I feel almost obligated to systematically refute it and take its author out behind the proverbial woodshed for some holiday season's beatings. One such piece of vomit-inducing cancer comes courtesy of a certain Bruce Livesey, who writes for a Canadian outlet called the National Observer. In mid-

The trees grew wild, the leaves were green. No sign of man was to be seen. I walked through grove and shadowed vale, Through sunlight bright, and moonlight pale. Through fields of cane that brush the sky, And halls of trees where cool winds sigh. Past rolling hills and meadows green, No fairer sight was ever seen! Past streams uncounted, swift and free, I heard their waters sing to me. They bade me hail and welcome home, To secret glens I call my own. The world was fair and shining bright, I wept in joy at such a sight. I knelt in fallen leaves to pray, In thankfulness that autumn day.

At least once in our lives, something will happen that is so earth-shaking, so unprecedented, and so enormously impactful that everyone remembers exactly where they were and what they were doing at the precise moment it happened. The assassination of John F. Kennedy was such an event. The 9/11 attacks were another. But within the past year, another such event has been added to the list, one that will likely leave just as big an impact if not bigger on the civilized world’s collective psyche. So where were you, and what were you doing, when you found out that Trump had been elected President? Me, I was writing a poem—or at least

You do not know Katrina. You’ve heard the stories. Maybe you've seen the video footage of gale-force winds and roaring waves, of roofs torn off of houses and huge pleasure yachts tossed about as if they were nothing more than toys. But you don’t know Katrina. You weren’t here. You don’t know what it was like. You never experienced the moment the power gave out, when the food in the fridge began to spoil and your children began to ask, over and over, when they were going to eat and you didn’t know what to tell them. You weren’t here when the wrath of Hurricane Katrina descended upon a grand old city like

There’s a story that folks in this neighborhood tell, Of a coven that opened a portal to Hell, They dwelt in Camp Claiborne, far back in the woods, And hid all their faces beneath masks and hoods. Camp Claiborne is evil, its soil now attainted, Its buildings of concrete with blood once were painted, And yet, my dear reader, you also should know, That at its inception the camp wasn’t so. In the wake of Pearl Harbor the camp was erected, But what it would come to, none could have suspected. They used it to ready young soldiers for war, They trained to perfection and then trained some more. But once the war ended and peace was de