Chainsmoking menthols,
creating clouds on parade.
Living in the dark;
frenching hurt that I've made.
There's a sadness in my comfort
and a comfort in my sadness.
***, fame, ******* down
commercialized madness.

I don't dream of pornstars
as much as I dream of clothes.
Videogames to escape it all,
carbon monoxide through my nose.
Too good for this and that;
entitlement at an all-time high.
Doing television to help me live,
or maybe to help me die.

Spotify for the masses
beating in my brain.
Youtube and pornhub
to make me feel the same
as the lost I compare to myself
and the celebs I want to be.
I want to be on edge, rich, validated;
I want to live in a fractured harmony.

Some Autumn evening..
I grabbed a cigarette.
Lit it without thinking.
A few years after..
Another Autumn day..
I met you.
I love you daily.
Without thinking
Because who knows?
One day, you may replace...
My pack of Marlboro Menthols.

I stood over the sink
Scrubbing our negroni glasses
Wishing the ginger-scented soap
Would wash away the cancer
Because the chemo didn’t work

I was wearing eyeliner
When I first met you
We’d laugh about that later
Over a bottle of wine
And patatas bravas

We always had our weekends
Movie dates and inside jokes
We would guffaw at the
Fuckery of it all
My god your laugh
How it filled a room

I remember when you said
“I love you, Christopher…
because you just GET ME”
You expressed appreciation
For how I carved out time
For our friendship

I reminded you,
“I don’t carve out time for you,
I shove everything away while
screaming ‘I NEED MY HEIDI TIME!’”

*******.
I need my Heidi time

For years you were
The most consistent thing in my life
Always there for one another
We were each other’s touchstones
I realize this now more than ever
During my weekends spent alone

Wine tastes different now
Something’s missing
Going to the movies feels strange
It’s like the hero has
Left the frame

Remember when I smoked cigarettes?
You’d *** a drag as we crept
Through early evening traffic
On our way to get gelato
Or if we were feeling sassy
Maybe an affogato

I switched to vaping
When you went into hospice
Then back to menthols
When your spirit left this world

I’m addicted to our memories
More than the nicotine
They bang around my head
Like a song or a scent
Nostalgic  
And
Lingering

You tattooed
“CEDENDO VINCES”
On your wrists
“By yielding, you will win”
My finger traced those words
While I held your hand

Last breaths

But what are deaths?

Transitions
Energy
Shifting
A spark
Returning

/ / /

Those letters live
On my wrists now
A reminder of her
The sister I never had
And sometimes
I still hear her laugh

I never thought I'd be
a pack a day
kind of girl.

I've seen the school assemblies,
heard my mother's shrill voice,
Don't you know what those things will do to you?
I've heard about the tar and the ash
and the cancer and the ventilators.

But there's something
about smoke curling around itself,
warm and inviting in the sharp,
snow scented air,
tiptoeing around my head
like a house cat.

There's something dangerous in
the scent of smoke on my skin,
in the taste of ash on my tongue.
Something that seems to say
I am not the kind of girl to **** around with.

It's a secret, a sly smile,
something that is all mine.
It's a destructive tendency,
it's a bad decision.
But it's mine, mine, mine
to make.

A Monday morning in Richmond
     is like waking up with your head
   shaking with commotion.

You pray while you take a dump.
       You end up going across the street to Starbucks,
    with three-sixty left on your credit card.

For some reason unbeknownst to you,
you feel that you're a Renaissance artist,
brought to earth to perform studies on human beings.

Little by little you realize that you're the son of God.
There's a moldy tennis ball in
your pocket labeled: God.

Rap, or is it, Rock music that pumps through your ears?
And you're not afraid anymore.
You start to notice the handwritten facade built around your surroundings.

The State Farm billboards
perched above the scaffolding.
Your nose drizzles with crimson.

Memories of the Christopher Walken Impersonator stains the keyboard.
There is no real difference between the garbage man
and your best friend, the one who supplies you with mescaline.

And the comedown feels like a Indian Monsoon.
Electrocute your senses
until you've turned numb to your baby sister Victoria.

The Toyota Avalon cruising up
the street corner with the yellow high beams
is not the white witch from The Wizard of Oz.

Trip falls.
Inhale smoke.
Speculate more.

Dirigibles in the clear, blue sky plummet down.
You listen to your parents while you're high on *****,
wondering why mom dukes looks like Johnny Depp.

Fingers tremble as you try to type out
a handwritten letter from prison.
You meant to text message your mom, "Happy Mother's Day."

And instead
you typed out to her,
"Happy Birthday Mother!"

Lows and highs permeate through your heart.
Caving in, the walls crush into each other.
That girl was married and you gave her a head start on life.

You stole your best friend's birthday money to buy M. You tell yourself everything
is going to be okay as you swivel in your leather recliner,
A ****** dollar bill jammed up your left nostril.

Long, blue rails dotting the wrinkled notebook paper,
used up from the last owner. You
can't stop coughing.

You throw up on your clothes.
And you start to think that
maybe you are ******* up and you can't stop without an intervention.

Then
you start to think,
maybe this is all in my head.

The cold wind nips at your exposed ankles.
Red sores develop on the back of your elbows.
Local pariah is far away from his hometown.

Your favorite Uncle has stage 4 lung cancer,
and you're chain smoking menthols
to ease the edge that splits your brain in half each morning.

What is struggle without the lost—
without the success on the other side of sanity?
You pop prescriptions to ward off the insects gnawing away at your eyeballs.

Gouge your intestines with a straight edged blade bought
from the dollar store.
Ode to Keroauc.

The unholy manuscript written with pen and needle.
Cool story bro.
But you have nothing, but mistakes to offer to this unjust world.

And earth continues to spin on an uneven axis.
When it comes to a point where fiction and nonfiction
        are void of speculation.

           When it comes to the point where reality and dreams coincide
and you begin to stumble
over your shoelaces that are tied.

When it comes to a point where
               your enemies and friends seem the same that is the point
when you attempt to sleep.

But sleep will always allude you, you Danny Art
          So read your poetry aloud to the unsung.
To the sleepless.

The Walkers dressed in rags approach you,
smoking on black and milds, dark rings
circling their eyelids.  

And the time of night which you so longingly search for
in the face of listening to The Dark Knight soundtrack, gives you a pulse, a sudden click that boosts you into peril.

That bloodstain drenching
the corner of your eye sweats profusely. And that's when you start to wonder:
is everything that I'm doing baked in fallacy and witchcraft?

The comedown.
The comedown.
The comedown.

You are the burden of my fellow constituents, lost in reverie,
gone in madness, forlorn from deeds,
that are too great to imagine.

Your tears mean nothing
in comparison
to the world at large.

And that's okay.
And that's okay.
And that's okay.


You begin to discover,
that you do not write poetry,
but you write greeting cards in a journal.

Or a pen and pad,
ink
and blood.

I wish you'd develop and addiction to me
in the same way you're addicted
to your menthols.

Mary, plain name.  Mary, mother of God
Mary, Queen of the Strip Mall
Mary, daughter of a King and a *****
Divinity in her blood, conqueror of lands,
Monarch of her body, kingdom of junkies.
Nails inlaid with pearls, mink lashes and onyx eyes
Indigo polyester wraps her 36, 30, 41,
saltwater taffy legs, ****, and ***.
Mary wasn’t a tall boy, Mary is a funnel cloud queen
Obsidian brazilian in velcro, soda can curls.
Mary has no titles, Mary is a *******, Mary is an exile.
Queen of cream stucco and neon and parking lots.
Mary has disciples, all named Judas.
She has Roy Cohn, the judge’s son, and Louis XIV on their knees in prayer.
She has **** Cheney, Little Richard, and Freud their knees in the bathroom behind the Tesco.
Mary doesn’t confess, doesn’t beg, doesn’t buy.
Mary the conqueror, Alexander reincarnate, she survives.
Body bathed in ultraviolet, cocoa butter, vaseline, and newport menthols.
Mary talks to God in the mirrors at the salvation army.
Mary is scared of dying, she knows she is no ones martyr.
Mary never kneels, left the Bible in the motel nightstand.
A graceful end, a unceremonious departure.
Trade rose petals for needles and styrofoam slurpee cups.
Mary’s mistresses, lovers, and wives, gave her a few lead rounds,
Left her in the strip mall mausoleum.
Mary, queen of the carnal, saint of suburban perversions.
Mary never asked God for forgiveness or a fix.

Loving you
Was a lot like smoking
I knew it was bad for me
But I did it anyways

replacing white lines with gray ash and sleeping in beds for sleeping in bathrooms and you wonder if you had any self respect in the first place because this afternoon you tried to think of your happiest memories in the past year and it wasn't when you were in someone's arms or thinking of your successes in the mirror while you flexed your kickass young *** it was when you were smoking bummed menthols and your friend commandeered a miniature tractor in the tenderloin and conducted two drug deals in less than 30 minutes and you watched her disdainfully with her girlfriend and wondered where on ******* earth you could get a three dollar old fashioned and let a forty year old flirt with you for coke and you wouldn't even have to do anything for it wouldn't life be nice like that

4:30 AM.
I needed the lucky cigarette
but didn’t smoke it.
You were downstairs sleeping
though I had had too much coffee
to be able to join you.
All of that coffee was mixed
with whiskey creamer; I threw up
the next morning.
You were calm about everything,
keeping me from going over the edge.

4:30 AM.
I was staring at the snow
thinking about your touch
while the smoke fogged my room.
I needed your arm around me
as I contemplated a life different
to the one I’d been living.
The one I’m still living,
but having you around
makes it a hell of a lot easier.

Marlboro Menthols, Lights, or Milds
Cowboy-killers, cancer-sticks
Guilty pleasure, a necessary fix
Holding hands with coffee

You get that jolt
Or shall I say relief
Days become more bearable
Courtesy of these,

Alcohol as a 3rd dimension
Aiding in more than just sleep
Take a pull and fill the need
Clear your head for a quick second

Alcohol, caffeine, nicotine;
They’re all I need

They say,
old habits die hard.
Don't I know it.
I put down the bottle for a while,
picked it back up.
Older now, more refined.
Bourbon,
instead of the cheap rot gut,
of my youth.
It all kills you in the end.
Still can't go out in public.
Teeth grinding,
Who's the enemy?
Who's the snake in this crowd?
Do I have my weapon?
Constantly clutching leather bound steel,
haven't needed the blade,
in a long time,
but must always be ready.
Marlb menthols,
pack a day, at least.
Smoke one to take the edge off,
there's always an edge.
Serial monogamist,
constantly striving for love,
hopeless romantic.
Hopelessly falling for women so venomous,
they could teach vipers,
a thing or two.
Picked up
a couple new ones but,
the old habits die hard

he read Brautigan
and thus would say all this is juvenile
and not real
he was real in a ***** brown sweater he wore
every day I knew him that smelled like menthols
and sweat and dope (he called it dope
sometimes because Bukowski did and he
read Bukowski too)

of course
he was real in his Catholic school
sports coat and fresh face once
without the 5-day beard he took to
wearing as a ******* to the system and other
real things like that which he sang
about on his guitar with a hole
in the bottom

the one he found in a
second hand store just like he always dreamed
he would and they would make sweet sad
music (that high and lonesome sound)
together forever he wrote his
poems to the tune of its steel strings
when he would sit at home at night and get
high and lonesome too

and so would I
because he thought I was ugly but didn't know
how to say it so he let me tag along for a few years
and let me sing in my off key death rattle
and lent me Brautigan and Bukowski
so I could know what was real and not real
but I didn’t learn my lesson so well

now did I?

darling,
you are the story
i will never tell
to my future kids

you are the words that
will bleed like rain on
diary pages

you are the empty
cups of coffee I’ll
fill my cluttered desk

you are the ashes
of yet another
wretched pack of menthols

you are forever
and will always be
my empty, painful
secret; love me, please?

I grew up in a village
Americans always seem to laugh
at the very idea of a village
how quaint?
but I did
it was five or ten years behind the times
and in the pub,
the huntsman,
the local
there is an old Marlboro
cigarette vending machine
with lights and menthols
and 27's and reds
and milds and ultra milds
and all the others
I'm too drunk to remember
I miss those machines
bells rung of a simpler time
I miss those machines

On my bookshelf sits a cup of cigarettes,
Menthols-
But I’m not a smoker.
Every now and then I pull out my lighter
Take a few drags
And curse at myself for letting go once again-
But I’m not a smoker.
And it’s not an addiction.
It’s simply lost willpower
Letting myself drop the promises I make to myself
To sit and smoke a few
Taste the burnt mint roll across my tongue-
But I’m not a smoker.
I always buy a new pack
When I notice the cup running low,
Never let it empty completely
That would mean I smoke-
But I'm not a smoker.

I remember when I sat at that bar,
Thoughts in my head colliding like car crashes-
I was in the process of emptying my bones and my wallet-
I just got paid that morning.
I was already floating on the stool,
But it wasn't enough
Because you were still crossing streets in my mind
Picking at the last garden on the corner of the crashes
Calendulas and canna lilies
Lightly decorating my frontal lobe-
I wanted you gone.

Later that night,
I went back home
To my haunting four walls
Lines of poetry on the knives
Ready to jab you like nobody else could
Lines of thrill on the table
Cutting edges of my desolation
Just a cheap trip
To somewhere you aren't

It's easier to not think about you
Because you take too much from me
And give nothing in return.
In my body,
I have nothing.
You took my persona,
And I was so vulnerable
I sold the inner working in my bones for 30% off
And a pack of cigarettes.

I'm only filling voids you created
But I'm running out of sources,
If I leave right now-
If I'm off this earth in the morning,
What would you do with the parts you took?

Reading a friend's poetry
and learning about myself--
learning new articulations.
Switching to menthols
for as long as this cold lasts.
Realizing my body wants nicotine
but my mouth wants smoke,
that very often one, not the other,
will be satisfied--that is what's in conflict.

I am trying to be a child,
and I could go philosophically about that
or regressively--
Sort of, it is not the bottle itself I sip
which makes me the rosy ribald randy carouser
but what I put back into the bottle then the trashbin
which displaces the liquid up to my lips.

But regardless of my intents and drinking habits,
I'll still be splashing in the water,
running along the edge of the pool
building a current, a whirlpool
compelling my friends into water,
tackling and dunking and pull them underneath,
and gasping together for breath,
swept along and swelling
hoping to summon a Maelstrom
to engulf me and all.

i still remember her braless
in the summer sun of Vilano beach
she's just wrapped in my undershirt
and glowing in the Spanish wind
she still lives in the tunnels
way down below my heart

we couldn't find wifi
in her apartment so i knelt
at her alter in the whirling dark
but she kept me
at arm's length and touched me
only with her fingertips as if
i was particles in a braille warning
her fingerprints smelled like menthols
i can still taste her skin on my teeth

i slipped just as she caught her footing
she stood silent and true on the raised edge
she said she was looking for something to
hold onto, "well, what about me," i asked
but her fingers just formed rings around my eyes
to dam the water there she cut the string
that was always between us
she laughed as i was on my way down
through the vines i saw her rising
toward the ceiling

and now any time i make love to someone else
she comes to me projected on any bedroom or
back alley wall she opens my chest
so the Spanish wind can escape
and shows me the places
she inserted the blade

you said 'don't lie to me
i can see your eyes'

so we sat on the jeep stop and
talked about feelings i'm
not sure i had.

you wanted i cry on your shoulder
cause you knew my loss

i was unfeeling
'can't do that on demand'

but suddenly it was 9PM and i was an ugly mess
sitting on the ground smoking menthols
wondering what the **** just happened

i was always the shoulder to cry on
so yours was a foreign place

but thank you for taking me places

The grave of my teenage daughter
is a restaurant she was born at 16.
I was told she began smoking long reds for long breaks – they lasted 15 minutes at most – and she had her first sip of alcohol there. Coffee liqueur from a straw in booth 14 from a customer who later became her lover.

The next lover was the second to slap her, and following that was the first kiss she ever received from someone she admired – even though he didn’t admire her back.
It was near the gumball machine, right between the hanging claw and the golfing game. Neither had worked in years. But the lights still flickered, and she always used to talk about how the neon chants radiated across his grimace when he asked her for a kiss.

Even he knew it was only for her.
Even she knew it was never for him.
But she agreed anyway.

The waiter told me that she smoked an entire pack of Menthols after, as if to brush her teeth, but it didn’t cleanse a mint memory. It only burned it away, etched it into the cement curb where we last saw her – drinking one last time as the yellowing sky stretched over the horizon and left her smoke as ash against the morning mist.

A girl flicked a lighter next to me,
she flicked it on
as the whole room pulsed
and I felt strange
because her skin was on mine,
and Stephen rolled
on stage.

The cloud in the room
was thick and it was
a fog of Marlboros, Virginia Slims,
Menthols, Menthol Lights, Kools,
and all other sorts of ghosts.

Stephen made fire with his hands,
flailed like a marionette
and let the spirits loose.

He blew a baritone:
"I feel like we can really get close to each other,
in this tiny room."

Demons
can rise
and make fire;
can rise and make your belly feel
like hell
and molasses:
black and sweet.

Demons
can rise together
and make love
in a tiny room
that crackles.

There was a time when I glimpsed the future
The possibilities it held sparked something in me
I was no longer consumed by the tedium that had been relentless in recent days
I could taste new beginnings
I became blind to the gray scale world I'd been living in

Ah that lovely haze
Those were the times when I climbed on rooftops
When I'd walk on the train tracks over the river smoking menthols, drunk on life and ***** sprites

Since then the fog has lifted and the world has returned to its dull state
I don't have any desire to climb on rooftops
I don't see what the point would be
And those train tracks that stretch over the river
Can't even reignite that something in me
And it seems I'm stuck on the 27s again

Suburbia greeted me with pale hands in my late teens.
She was a wasteland in a mini skirt; in its’ own right it could be called a Cave with Plato egregiously driving his brand-new Prius 90 miles an hour saying “this is really living as long as you don’t look back” and all you can do is nod your head vigorously because the twisted **** that had settled surreptitiously in your baby lungs was giving you daylight hallucinations. My endeavors didn’t end there when they should have.
There was something uncanny about the way streetlights gave you the eternal glare. Of creating ordinary neighborhood streets appear like you’ve been there before in a dream, in another body. In a dazed stupor the sounds of a television and a light coming from a garage is forgiving in your misguided attempts to be comfortable in a foreign space. It could almost feel like home when your repressed trauma keeps resurfacing while you’re trying to introduce yourself. Almost.
In these polite badlands with everything uniformed the people I met were always trying to stand out from the serene landscapes. Sitting in plaid couches I was giddy playing the nihilist. Rerun episodes of Portlandia playing but all I remember from that smoky room were brown pants that looked extremely crisp to the touch and I wanted to reach out my hands and see if they would crunch under the paperweight of my heavy palms. I didn’t but I’m sure they would’ve emitted the sound of potato chips being eaten in a frenzy.
When I wasn’t walking through dark rooms feeling through what could have been hallways, a family’s living room or the cool gates of hell I was meandering my way through drowsy parties where boys with the names like Dusty and Slaughter were prevalent. Each with their own bizarre story about how they stole their parents’ money one night and took off spontaneously. Driving all the way to Nevada with nothing but half a tank of gas and one pack of cigarettes. You could almost pinpoint their personalities by the type of cigarettes they smoked. Most of them holding different colored American Spirits. Had I been smarter I would have asked for a light and a smoke. Never mind that I was always deadly afraid that I had some undiagnosed lung disease and that asphyxiation was my biggest fear or that I had a pack of Marlboro black menthols in my purse that were over a year old. I found my corner sitting in a worn outdoors chair. The ones where the armrest comes built in with a cupholder. My beer ice cold sitting awkwardly sideways while I tried to consider why the host of the party was wealthy yet so hostile. My favorite party game was the one where I took hit after hit of joints being passed around until I was crazy glued to my chair and my brain started to feel like a lagoon that continued to melt into a Campbell’s soup I once had as a child. Everyone completely unaware of the horror that the house had become to me. Somewhere in the distance I was acutely aware of who I would go home with, why my ventures into the suburbs had sparked my intrigue in the first place. The only reason why I had endured feeling like a spider watching a **** film and why I had lost my virginity just a day before. I was a displaced specimen thinking about her ***** in a room of 30 people or more.

I inhale the faint smell of menthols and cheap cologne
I want to trace every ridge
Curve
And bump
Of your body
With my lips
Scratches chalk outline your back
Leaving red lines that mark my trust
When tears of passion
Fall from my pores
Just know
When you're in me
You're inside my head too

Those Ray Bans I begged you to get for me last summer. The ones that were always lopsided because I sat on them every time I threw myself into your passenger seat.

The nozzle we used to ***** onto the hose to fill up water balloons before we rode around in your car and hucked them at all those ******* bikers.

That glass pipe we bought at Amazing Adult Express. The one that changed colors every time we got high together.
...Not to mention the plastic pink **** you found in a bathroom at college and told me I could have.

My eyeliner pencil that never came off my face even with make up remover because I charred it with my lighter too many times.

The squished pack of Marb Menthols you plucked from my back pocket and wouldn't give back because  Smoking is for ***** girls.

My virginity.

And the ironic 'Thank You For Not Smoking" sign you stole for me from the Comfort Inn the night after prom.

That last glass of wine at your family dinner you drank for me because It would have been too much.

The purple lace bra and ******* I cooked you dinner in last Valentines day. The night I let you do me on the kitchen counter.

And that Needham Football shirt I love to sleep in. It used to be yours but I think we would both agree, it should be mine now

By Arcassin Burnham

I fell in love with your ignorance,
It didn't show cause you were heaven sent,
I started aiming for the craziness,
Then took a trip back to my consciousness,
I fell in love with a your innocence,
Theres nothing crazy about deliverance,
I push your buttons cause I care with bliss,
I was use to whatever heaven sent,

Staring at the cold ground with sore eyes and leaky
Sockets,
Laying at corners of my head that's dripping from
My pockets,
I don't have a lot of money to buy some fancy
Concoction,
But to impress you just to caress you is not an option,
So I walk through these blue lights,
The subject I can no longer bite,
Hanging out on the cold winter night with a box
Of menthols and the devil cries,
the evening is certainly quite,
A sight to see up in the night sky,
But tonight this love can not die,
And this is the reason why I said...
I fell in love with your ignorance,
It didn't show cause you we're heaven sent,
I started aiming for the craziness,
Then took a trip back to my consciousness,
I fell in love with a your innocence,
Theres nothing crazy about deliverance,
I push your buttons cause I care with bliss,
I was use to whatever heaven sent,
Whatever heaven sent.

rite aid was out of maverick red 100s;
they only had shorts.
i had to buy a pack of newports
and the thought of shedding you
made me tremble as i slid my card.
yes, i switched from your menthols
back to my reds and yes, i kept your brand.

the other day i walked into my room
and the scent of cigarettes took me back,
back to the times of us sharing cigarette
after cigarette and i began to cry.
i called my therapist but she didn’t pick up.

the thought of quitting smoking crosses my mind
on at least a weekly basis, but i refuse to let you
ruin an agent of death i held in my hand
even before you came along.
i will not stop and i will continue to shed
the strongest tears for you.