Rinku

Poems and Prose

• "Be my savior, and I'll be your downfall."
  
  A section of writing and poetry based on and inspired by Rin.
  
  

• A Muse Me

  When in boredom my mind doth hire
  One sickly muse with curling grin
  Whose whispers soft to me inspire
  The tear and shed of human skin
  
  One ghostly hand to tie me down
  Fractured patterns of a mind insane
  While oft the whispers do resound
  Wall to wall in my rattled brain
  
  Stringless puppet of my own design
  Skeletal body struggling for life
  Sculpted features clear and fine
  Standing tall with sharpened knife
  
  A conjured shadow's softened glare
  With only punctured thoughts to share
  
  5/18/2005

• Slit

  Without much recognition,
  he looks up, his eyes empty,
  but spilling tears down his flushed cheeks.
  
  A spark of something, probably guilt
  traces in his eyes as he sees her
  and a small, pathetic grin
  takes residence upon his face.
  
  "It had to be done..."
  He says,
  as slowly...
  his life poured out.
  
  4/21/2005

• Novelist

  Your life I’ve splashed across the floor
  In papers, books of myriad light
  For copper tones of milky lore
  You’ve wandered now out of sight
  
  Spread thin along those wooden planks
  A landscape made of nothing more
  Than shivering instinct on animal flanks
  A visionless surface to a faceless core
  
  Entombed volumes of what’s in store
  Triangular whimsy taught to fly
  Rampaging mindsets, thoughts galore
  All the time questioning why
  
  Within these ramparts of flimsy gore
  Learn your words and twist of tongue
  Then search among said scattered shore
  To find that which your life begun.
  
  9/6/2005

• Therapy

  Eternity rushes through my ears
  but the room is deathly silent
  stares are jabbed at me pointedly
  the practice won a new client
  
  I look for reasons why
  I do these things to myself
  and all the voices have to say is
  'Sir, Sanity's fallen off the shelf.'
  
  Always stealing away my sleep
  restless spirits plague my mind
  they're not your common incubii
  yet be cannot say what kind
  
  The things we do to ourselve
  when we are incurably awake
  when lost in perpetual quandry
  'I pray the Lord my soul to take.'
  
  I look for reasons why
  I do these things to myself
  I have nothing left to offer
  as my senses dare to melt
  
  Lines of thought tracing
  the numbness of my brain
  lulls into a sense of something
  some psycho-novacaine
  
  Addicted to my gameplay
  I no longer feel alive
  striving for redemption
  is it possible I have died?
  
  I look for reasons why
  I do these things to myself
  psychiatric sickness
  is now my only wealth.
  
  4/1/2005

• Going Blind

  
  
  "I don't ask anything from this world,
  but to stare at these white walls in my mind.
  To stare at these eternal trappings,
  until I have gone blind."

• Somehow Good

  
  
  
  and the world seemed good somehow
  as his tears poured out below his brow
  such a mind set free of its bonds
  let sail through the quivering fronds
  A smile passed over his spread lips
  and his blood spilled over his hips
  though something seemed just right
  as his vibrant life now turned to white
  His eyes dulled just as they should
  and the world seemed somehow good.

• Persisting Thoughts

  School couldn’t have let out sooner. Walking the city streets, he was dimly aware that it was raining now. He loosely fit his uniform sweater over his thin shoulders and buttoned it around his wasted frame. His mind was thrown elsewhere as he passed a florist, the heavy scent of roses intoxicating his nostrils. He let out a small withheld breath.
  
  
  
  A routine walk through his woodland home turned sour as his sensitive ears picked up the subtle violent rustle of leaves. The sounds called to him in a most curious way. Being young and reckless, he crashed through the underbrush and found himself in a clearing that wasn’t empty.
  
  Before him stood an enraged man, tall and muscular, holding at arm’s length a female, neither girl nor woman, gripping her at the throat. The girl’s brows were furrowed in a position most anguished and his eyes could not leave her face, marred in beauty only by a dripping gash horizontal to her eye. Speechless, the gravity of the scene before him dawned on his enraptured brain.
  
  He finally brought himself to act and charged at the man, elbowing him in the face. He dropped the girl. A self-made hero, he continued to advance on the offender, slamming him into a tree. The girl collected herself at the edge of the stream, eyes wide with horror. The man who would have her dead slid to the ground and gained his feet in a fumble to escape.
  
  She turned her face to her rescuer; a tall, lanky teen, skinny as death, seemingly unable to do what he’d just done. She was shaking still, as he offered a hand and pulled her to her feet.
  
  “Are you alright?” His voice was soft and rasping. She noticed now that his chest labored for breath, the skin tightening over the bare, visible ribs.
  After a moment of looking him over, she answered in a wispy voice: “Yes… Who are you?”
  
  He blinked a moment, and answered after wetting his lips. “Rinku. Rin for short.”
  
  “I’m River.” She broke into a smile, her green eyes dancing in the sunlight.
  
  
  
  That face in his memory stung him. Closing his eyes on the gray-scaled world, he entered the woods that held his home. The thoughts had left a bitter taste in his mouth, but it was half welcomed in reverie. He recalled the first time she leant over, her reddish hair brushing his shoulder, her ever present scent of roses enshrouding him and she kissed him. He had pulled away, his snow-white cheeks turned scarlet. She had been confused at his actions and he was unable to explain.
  
  He unconsciously slid down the route to his door and stopped, hand on the knob. His hair slid over his face as he bowed his head against the wood of the door.
  
  
  
  “What do you think you’re doing?” The woman hissing the words stood before River, hands placed on her hips, one jut out in a pre-Madonna pose. “How dare you!”
  
  River’s mouth worked and twisted as she stood up for herself. She stepped forward, brows furrowed in anger. “And who are you to tell me off?” The woman’s face contorted in anger and she made for the gun on her hip. Rin, watching, was quicker.
  
  He slipped his hand into his pocket and loosed a few kunai knives at the woman, who he later knew as Lefa. They cut through the air as a warning, grazing her skin and severing a few strands of hair. Rin positioned himself in front of River protectively, unaware of the offense he just made. Lefa was fuming.
  
  “Leave her alone,” he commanded. Lefa lifted her thin brows in shock and disbelief at this uprising, stroking the damaged part of her hair with shaking hands. River, unwanting of this protection replaced herself in front of Rin, elbowing him to the side. “River,” Rin reached for her shoulder.
  
  Lefa was unamused and outraged, uncaring for the lover’s quarrel. She removed her gun from its holster and aimed in a fluid movement. Rin, anticipating such, threw River behind him.
  
  The woman unloaded three shots into his chest.
  As his tortured body crumpled to the ground he could not recall River’s offense to Lefa. All he could register was the pounding in his brain and River, turning from him and leaving him to his fate, no tears tracing down her cheeks over the light scar under her eye. But for as long as she lived, and maybe longer, she would remember his face.
  
  
  
  His hand rested heavily on his left shoulder, as he tried to figure out how he managed to cling to his life that night. He entered the house and dropped his bag on the floor. Still vaguely aware of his soaked clothing, he lifted hair from his eyes and sauntered to the kitchen to hydrate himself. Standing in front of the sink, he stared ahead into the wall, cracked and brown. The house was empty, as it had been for the few years since his parent’s death. His eyes unfocussed momentarily but snapped back as his legs decided to take him down the hall.
  
  He turned into the doorway of his room and shed his school uniform. The water-soaked clothing puddled on the floor of his room as he ran his fingers delicately over his skin, riddled with scar tissue old and new. The bullet wounds had long since healed but left their mark like all the rest of his injuries. His hair slid back over his face, unable to be held back. He tried to suppress further thought with things around him, but the silence penetrated his soul worse than any knife.
  
  
  
  “I can’t be with you anymore.”
  
  
  
  Those words stung worse. He grabbed handfuls of the hair at his temples, closing his eyes tightly to block out the world. 'I can’t be with you anymore. I can’t be with you anymore. I can’t be with you anymore.’ The words hammered over and over in his already numbing mind. All of a sudden, the day’s food no longer wished to remain inside. He fumbled through his door across the four-foot hall to the bathroom, crashing to his knobby knees to bow to the Porcelain Princess.
  
  After purging his system, he crawled to the sink, and stared at his broken reflection in the punched-in glass of the mirror. He briefly recalled the feeling of the glass in his fist, the blood oozing out of the neat slices. Shaking himself, he dragged himself to his feet and washed his face with frigid water. His breathing was un-rhythmic and sporadic, his irregularly beating heart racing as again memory gripped him in iron claws.
  
  
  
  River held out her hand to him. He was hurt and confused. He focused on the thin horizontal scar parallel to her eye, now fading and swallowed painfully. He put out his hand, shaking and cold to receive what he knew was coming. She dropped a ring into his hand, the tiger-eye stone burnt like fire, like the metal burnt his hand.
  
  He stared into its depths, recalling the dance of her emerald eyes the day he gave it to her. Stinging tears bit his eyes and traced down his sunken cheeks as he looked up. She was walking away, taking with her the scent of roses, forever after sinful to his senses and he remembered the rain that fell lightly on his shoulders and nose. He remembered wanting to die as he clasped the ring and hurled it with all his might into the on-coming darkness.
  
  
  
  Hunched over the sink, he beat a fist into his head to jostle the memory away. A deep well of emptiness threatened to eat him whole. He fought to catch his breath, but it seemed unwilling to be had. Her face, her eyes, her hair and body; each flashed through his vision and he buried his face in his palms, shaking all over.
  
  He bent to his knees, but unable to relieve himself of these thoughts, he instead scrambled up to the medicine cabinet. Knocking prescription bottles and other such trifle out of his way, he closed his hand over something cold. Calming down considerably, he again sank to his knees and laid himself out on the cold gray tile. She left him with no explanation, no reasons to how her feelings had changed. Only the memories…
  
  
  
  Tears streaming from his eyes, he lay and contemplated the razorblade in his hand.