Hurt Cut Bone

I am very hard to get along with regardless who you are in my life.
Including me.
I am not often as hard on others as I have been on you.
Long term, though, perhaps others would disagree.
When you open to me, I end up becoming frustrated and angry.
I get mean.

You want my Cary Grant.
Back to cutting.
Slice-and-dice me.
Me, full-on? No one can hack it.
Including me.

What frustrates me is your situation.
What angers me is my inability to do shit about it.
I can’t help, so it seems I harm.
It’s my lashing out at that we both find so hurtful.
It’s also incredibly stupid.
I think of people like you and me and it fills me with despair.
I know the world is viciously hostile to us.
Feels hopeless when I allow myself to see it.
I attack myself through you.
Knowing I hurt you hurts me.
It is like cutting but crueler.
If I let you be my heart I’d stab you to kill myself.
This cannot ever work out well.
We try and keep trying.

Gene Stewart was born on the 146th birthday of Charles Dickens in Altoona, Pennsylvania. He began writing eight years later and publishing three years after that.Editor Jeanne Cavelos favorably compared one of his unpublished short novels, Box Set, to J. D. Salinger’s work, while writer Harlan Ellison has called his work “Scintillant”.

Stewart’s fiction spans many styles and genres but hallmarks of his work include compassion for the common man; themes of doubt, paranoia, and the discovery of hidden worlds or agendas; and the integrity of the individual when faced with astounding events or intense challenges. Transformation by encountering and dealing with these hidden or wider worlds defines Ficta Mystica, which is the term he coined for what he most often writes. It might also be called mystical realism.

In 1980 he married his fiancée, who had just joined the US Air Force. For the next 22 years they traveled all over the United States, experiencing the deserts of Texas, the beaches of coastal Mississippi, the swampland of Georgia, the valleys of Ohio, and the prairies and plains on the region of the ancient Tethys Sea bed called Nebraska. In addition, they enjoyed extended stays in Japan and Germany.

His family includes three sons and two lively terriers. He currently lives in the American midwest, where he is researching and writing a novel of ancient sins, modern lies, and eternal truths.