Ferdinand in Pasadena, California #54 (Rage)

Your well will dry up, it's easily exhausted. You'll find yourself a wilted thorn bush, your outer appearance mirroring your inner ugliness; fat, poked with purplish veins and cellulite, adipose and formless drooping flesh masquerading as breasts and the coarse hair on your face that macrocosmically represents the tiny hairs that cover the bodies of winged insects that spread pestilence and plague by virtue of their uncleanliness. A fitting comparison; you're rotting inside, your breath stinking of disease and inward death. Your kiss is like devouring rancid meat.

David in Mitchell, South Dakota #53 (Self evaluation)

My dad almost always came home from work drunk and saying real weird stuff. He never hurt any of us or got mean or violent; he was just talkative, I guess you'd say. There's one thing he said to me when I was 11 that stuck with me. We had just gotten finished eating dinner and I asked him if it was OK if I went to watch TV in my room and instead of answering me, he put his hand on my shoulder and said: "Son, don't believe people when they tell you to love other people and try to live a good life. It's just some bullshit they drill into you. That's all you'll hear when you grow up; bullshit to make you a productive, easily managed member of the community. Life's more complicated than that. I've looked all over the world and inside myself for what they call love and mercy and I haven't found it anywhere, so I really think that it's just some fairy tale they try and sell you that you need to wake up from. Be a better man than I am, don't let them throttle your humanity out of you."

Marcus in Regina, Canada #52 (Redemption)

Only a wounded physician can hope to heal. Someone who has experienced the hurt things inside man and knows where to direct his scalpel; someone who knows what to remove and what can be saved. I've drank from the galling cup of sorrow, swallowed pain to it's dregs. I want to be healed and I want to heal.

Chuluun in Darvi, Mongolia #51 (Sexuality)

As the full moon rises I'm reminded of your menstruation and I drink from the great river of blood gushing from your ovaries. (Billy Pizarro)

Bao in Hong Kong #50 (Love)

I searched for someone to fall asleep in and I found you. When I finally awoke, I realized I was in the wrong place and lost in an immense desert with no food or water. As hope finally left me and I knew I was going to die from my thirst, I found the freedom and exhilaration that I had been so desperately seeking. The ecstasy of being lost to this world; so lost that all search would be fruitless.

Timothy in Issano, Guyana #49 (Transcendence)

If I have to hear another complacent pig's claim to enlightenment I'm going to puke my fucking guts out. I moved down here to get away from that. My allegiance is with the lost, the desperate, the failures, the traitors; people who understand that transcendence isn't a commodity and doesn't come without a thousand difficult renunciations, including the renunciation of yourself. I'm looking forward to disappearing from the face of this earth. I think I'll just stay here and become a savage; eat human flesh, destroy the false civilization I was born into inside myself.

Vladimir in Voronezh, Russia #48 (God)

...and God cloaked in the measureless mysteries of heaven and time without end must have shattered his Divine heart when He made form from Chaos. A heart has to broken to spill it's contents and so we're the blood of God's wounded, lonesome heart.