Bruce Crown

Trust me. What a phrase. Is it a phrase or an idiom? I was never a wordsmith and I was too far along in life to even attempt to tackle a problem as complicated as words. Do writers struggle as much with words as a painter does with his paint and his brush?__kay,_ it is impossible not to trust a beautiful woman. Even macho noir anti-heroes who talk about staying out of trouble and doin_ nothin_ for nobody always get sucked into intricate snares set for them by beautiful women_ I would not be an exception.

Angels should never be exposed to the dire darkness of despair in the tunnel of cosmic nothingness, and although I never believed such maddening thoughts; I couldn't help but feel spiritual in her presence.

Naturally, the plague of humanity named confidence (or pride to some), which symptoms often render each person to fiercely believe himself to be above average, let them to believe that it was others who were affected by this case but not them. Everyone thought they had the quintessential ability to detach themselves from the cases they were working, even if the victim looked and behaved exactly like their son, daughter, niece or nephew.

Those who__e left their bootprints in the trenches are those who value human life most. They get unwanted glimpses into the savage nature we really have underneath all the expensive clothes and moisturized skin. This of course, rules out the politicians, feminists, and liberals who are far too cozy hiding behind their daddies_ wallets and sophomoric mentalities as those who feign having tasted the true consequence of a single blood-drop darkening the sand.

The lighter something is, the easier it is to darken it.

A perfect example, in matters of life and death, of love and passion, of choice or destiny; options decrease to a singular course.

It takes courage and strength to be sensitive to things and even more strength and courage to own up to it or be vocal about it. Robots, the only things with a perfect lack of emotional capacity, are easily controlled, and I suddenly realized that__ why the military often trains people to suppress their emotions. Unfortunately for them, humans aren't machines. We feel, we love, we cry, we despair, and we rejoice. Anyone who__ ever tried to convince me not to feel is someone I shouldn__ have trusted. The only reason you should shut off your emotions and emulate a robot is if you're doing horrible things. How fatal my decisions have been. How many people would be loving, rejoicing, and feeling right now rather than crying indefinitely in the depths of the afterlife? If only I__ figured this out sooner.

The car housed a hysterical bumper sticker: Save the Planet, and I permitted a moment of contemplation to truly bask in this thought. Save the planet? What a joke. Save the planet from what? From ourselves? And save it for what? For ourselves? It was a kind of perpetual stupidity in a tug-of-war battle over trivial matters. Only imbeciles see things in black and white: liberal or conservative, yes or no, this or that. Those in power laugh at those people in their morally inverted shades of grey, basking in the labels they've created so the people are easier to control.

In rational worlds all the hierarchies of our world are reversed.

A successful actor is praised for never giving up his dreams to become someone else for a living but to dream to be an unmasked artist is a mortal sin in a consumerist society. Artists don't consume; they create things that can__ be consumed with riches. You consume art by seeing, by listening, by feeling, never by buying.

I checked my words carefully. Words more powerful than atom bombs and more cutting than AK-47s. People are fragile and words, not bullets will break them, and once they break every part of them spills out. Their soul, spirit, identity, ugliness, and their beauty. It__ all there, right in front of you if you know where to look. Most people see the ugly and I didn't want to become that. I thought I looked for beauty but then wondered why I often say such ugly things.

To say she is only a woman is to say a violin is a piece of wood with strings, and Dante is mere ink printed on paper.

People imprison themselves.

Hawks with broken wings; lions with broken paws; men with broken hearts, they all have one thing in common: they're all as sure to die as those unbroken.

First, our enemies were the natives, then they were the Nazis, then after a while it was the communists. Finally, at the pinnacle of what we__e calling civilization, our enemies are the Islamic terrorists. Our enemies seem to change over the course of history along with our ways of fighting them. But what hasn't changed is government profit; politicians and leaders seem to always be getting richer by the blood of our soldiers. Makes you wonder who the real enemy has been all this time.

I looked up at the ivory towers above us all. Nowhere else equals the feral design of this city. Tall skyscrapers that act as gorges hollowing out between flat cement dancing into narrow alleyways like bottomless pits. Building walls rusted the color of blood. Sometimes when you look down the horizon from afar the city looks wider than it is, like a thin field of magical lights gleaming with the hopes of children and idealists; a light on at midnight in one of the penthouses or the changing hues of the Empire State Building. Most of the time though, the city is covered with a layer of honking cars and greed, sirens and the war cry of solicitors, all full of brambles and impenetrable conscience; garbage, steaming manholes, and heat waves twirling smog and pollution through your lungs like mirages as you walk breathlessly through a boiling desert.

His studies were always second to Beatrice. He would've said everything was second to Beatrice but the flowery metaphors and literary devices can only stretch so far and for so many characters.

It was simpler just to keep things simple.