October Contest Winner - Jeffrey Park/Jarune Uwujaren

They Are All Insane
       Jarune Uwujaren

I find that the best time to work is morning
when the sky is still ink blue, sea-like,
the black clouds sailing by fast like clippers.

I enter through windows, measure my greed
by the smell of my sweat, which falls onto my patients’
open eyes. I drive thick ice picks beyond the orbs,
into the sockets. I let them scream. I bristle.

They are all insane, manic, when I first enter.
They always threaten me with defenestration.
But I persist and finish, then make coffee in their kitchens.
They owe me, these ingrates who scream as I cure their fear,
so I filch their bodies, holding them to me as I drink.




Born to a father who quoted Shakespearean soliloquies at breakfast, Jarune Uwujaren has had the sound of poetry trapped in her head since before she could read. She’s spent the past ten years of her life trying to set it free, earning an English degree and insomnia in the meantime. Her names mean "Diligence" and "Death is a Mystery".










THE END OF LOVE
     Jeffrey Park

The stench is always worst in the morning
as those once-blue eyes sink even deeper
into the clipper-cut grey head, and the lips that
used to be heavy with greed and gluttony part
slightly to emit the foul smell of ancient
pâté de foie gras, the odor thick and cloying.
You stretch out your hand, stroke bristles on
jowls that once rippled and danced with manic
abandon at little jokes about defenestration.
You hold a sip of coffee in your mouth, burning
away your last fears. A tiny dribble wets lips,
tongue, lets you filch one more tender kiss.





Jeffrey Park lives, works, writes and does a few other things in Munich, Germany, where Halloween is sporadically celebrated as an odd Anglo-Saxon tradition, much like fast food and reality television. That's the Germans for you. Links to all of his published writings can be found at www.scribbles-and-dribbles.com