When I see you for

The first and last time,

Your hair blowing back,

Your smile touching me

The way I want to touch

The curves of your body,

Which are shown off well

In the sudden light

That just fills me up

With intensity;

 

The warmth that I feel

With you in my sight,

So intense the warmth,

The way it melts glass

And makes the rocks slag,

Vaporizing steel,

Burning the air;

 

How I long for you

With all of the strength

That flattens buildings,

Turning all structures

Into a thin paste;

 

How I desire you,

Our parts mingling,

Coming together,

Drawn to the heat,

My lips to your lips,

My hips to your hips,

Carbon to carbon

Drawn into the cloud;

 

How we dance in love,

Mine in and on you,

Flying overhead,

Dancing on a breeze

Before the wind dies,

And we two coupled,

Poisoning the land

Together for a

Joint half-life as one;

 

When they remember

Me in memory

Among all the dead,

None of them will know

That in the very

Last second of life

As I was dying

I was truly alive.

James Ryan won the Beatles Embassy Imagination Award: Best Fan Fic for his story "I Read the News Today." Yes, believe it or not, you can still hold a vote with a surprise winner without a media circus ensuing or legions of lawyers running around your capitol.... For his birthday, he has hopes of actually being recognized as a writer; hey, weirder things have happened.... His work has appeared in such places as Dragon magazine, Lacunae, the Urbanite, the New York Times, and some of the better men's room walls across the state of New York. Until he gets the chance to follow the program for disenfranchised neurotic writers, he's doing the regular job and grad school schtick. His wife Susan and son Jamie just nod and smile when he starts to rant, which, all said, makes things that much easier.