You want horror? I’ll give you horror.
You want music? How about a dirge?
How about the feeling of feeling nothing?
Not fear or love or even boredom. Not feeling.
How horrible would that be? Or maybe not.
How about brain tumors and skin cancer?
Who doubts rectal cancer’s horror, rotting from
the inside out, reeking inverted guts exposed?
What about bloat, the Great Dane disease,
their intestines twist-knotting them to death?
And perfect lovers meeting at the worst time,
both stuck inextricably in others’ lifeless lives?
Shattered happiness is horror, potential lost,
Losing a child or a loved one’s murder, terror.
How do you recover from sending your child
off to school just to find her dead, shot up by
a murderer festering in a room, a closed door
emerging for a brief fatal foray out of alienation?
I cannot write any greater horror. Unimaginable.
How to write horror stories worse than the real?
Controlled horror in letters would play us God.
We can manage and shape–to know the ending.
To know: Coping with horror is to make it. Write.
In the gaze of the other 