The words lay face down on the scrabble board
Extra letters sit in front of me as I shuffle them around
I shuffle and shuffle
Put this letter here and this one there
I feel as if the word I'm looking for is close yet I never do see
I never see that word

My fists slam down onto the board as letters soar through the air and hit the ground like bullets.
My hand is bloody from the blow
Yet it doesn't faze me
Why should it?
For its only pain
Pain that will someday go away become invisible non existent forgotten
Forgotten as I already am
Doomed to damnation
Under a nation filled with evil
I am trapped under my own sins
With no escape

I try to rearrange the letters
I try to fix this mess I have caused
But I can't
The blood pours from my fist
Each drop falls to the rhythm of a rain storm
A red rain storm
Pattering down
Drop by drop
As one letter after another is covered and I can no longer tell A from z

I am lost
Lost in a sea of red
No one can save me now as my fist swells and thumps
Louder and louder
Thumping
Beating
Thumping
Beating
I try to make it stop
As I slam my fist harder and harder into the board

But it becomes louder and louder
Thumping
Beating
Thumping
Beating
I look to the small red square pieces to save me
But they can't
I am helpless
I am a gonner
Left here to suffer by my own fate
As my screams
And cries become muffled by the
Thumping
Beating
Thumping
Beating

Please God I struggle to scream as I continue to shuffle through the red square pieces
Piled up like a junk yard
Use less
Unwanted
Unimportant

Please God I scream again
But even god can not hear my cries
As I lay there on my knees
Weeping in my own blood

Then a light appears
A light brighter then the sun
It floats toward me
A bundle of light

I reach out to grab it yet it scurries away
Teasing me
After a short while it returns
Yet I'm hesitant to follow
Can I trust it
Can I trust it
Can I trust it?

like I trusted the world
Like the world that swallowed me whole then spit me back up and left me here to die

What do I have to lose
All I ever loved is gone
Gone
Gone to never return like the flowers as they are choked and left to die by the weeds
A shriveled up broken mess

So I follow that light
I follow it back to the junk yard of discarded red squares
I flip them over one by one as I begin to see tan
Tan and black
The blackness curves into intricate designs
Each a different letter
I delicately glide each piece across the board
Waiting for a word to appear
Some word
Some sign
Yet again there is none

I am ready to give up and end it all like I should have from the beginning until the light grows and shines brighter
The whole room is dark
Except for a sliver of space
Where the light is floating
And in that sliver of light
I see my blood
My blood
My sweat
My tears
And smeared in blood in the floor is a message
A message carved out with my own blood

LIFE

In big bold letters
LIFE

It had been obvious from the beginning yet I was too blind from my own ignorance and selfishness to see
It was there plain as day
LIFE
Life was not the shackle that I dragged across my ankle
Life was not the scars from being whipped

All the destruction I saw around me
All if the evil and sin of the world was not life
It was death

I was feeding death
Fueling it
Allowing it to grow inside of me
It was a seed watered by my own twisted desires
It was the drinking
It was the drugs
It was the regrets
But it's not too late
This thorny weed has not yet bloomed
And I have the opportunity to be saved
But only I can save my self

So I stand up from my bloody puddle and run
I run
And run
And run
As far away from here as I can
As far away from my regrets and mistakes
I run until I come to a beautiful pasture filled with white daisies
White delicate pure

The path I must take to get to the pasture lies ahead
I have a chance to take it
A second chance
I begin to move towards that path
But a strong wind blows me back as it softy whispers and tempts me to go back
To go back to the destruction
The mess I had created
I try to shake t off
As the wind floats and sways around my body
It feels so good
But I mustn't go back
I mustn't go back

My head begins to thump and beat
Thumping
Beating
I feel like I'm spinning in circles
I don't know which way is up which way is down
So I call to the daisies
I call upon the flowers as they stand tall like an army
My army

I begin to call out to them louder and louder as I try to ward off my own demise
I continue to spin so I close my eyes and I hear a faint sound of something dancing across the sky above me

I hold out my hands and a white daisy sways and lands on them
I clench my fingers tightly around it as it becomes splattered with my blood
I smell the sweet scent of its petals
And drink itS sweet nectar
A nectar that will cure me
A nectar that will be my medicine

Suddenly I stop spinning
I open my eyes and look down
I am standing in the pasture
Surrounded by white daisy's
I am protected and safe with this army
An army that won't let anything happen to me

Finally the wind gives up and dies down
It's so quiet that I can hear myself think
So I lay down among the daisies
And think
Think about where I am going for I do not remember how I came to lay among these daisies in this pasture.

Weeks later I pass a school yard
I see two kids playing scrabble
So I walk over to see what words cover the board and the board is blank
Te two kids just sit there
Hypnotized
Mesmerized
By the board
Minutes pass and still nothing
No movement
No sound
So I look at the pieces the players had to play and see the letters
LI on one side
And on the other side
FE
So I collect the tan squares
And i lay them across the palm of my hand
As I carefully
Meticulously look each one over
As if I had seen these somewhere before
But I can't remember so I place them down on the board
And continue my path back to the pasture to lay among the white daisies