I'm sick to death

of gulping unspoken words and
sulking tears of frustration
bitter and burning all the way down

of drowning my anger under
the stagnant swamp of "nice",
choking alone in murky depths.

of pulling out my fangs
and curling my tail
and suffocating my soul

of gently nudging all the sheep
who wander, lost and stupid
back towards the green field.

Are all my smiles deceptions?

I want so badly to be good.

But despite it all I am a wolf,
a wild and howling thing
who trembles with pleasure at the taste of blood.

What sheep could understand this loneliness?

What wolf could forgive this betrayal?

You were an intellectual jewel
a glittering phenomenon in the sky, some disturbance of space-time
in which all things were knit together in a subjective pattern
and so tightly pulled together that light reflected from every facet
in turn, as you spun, like a windmill,
like a tyger
frightening in your perfect symmetry
in which every stripe was a symbolism
and every red a cleansing fire
which purified everything it touched,
or touched it.

The love I felt for you was first of pity,
for you did not know what it meant to feel,
and you had few friends.

But in time I grew to love you properly,
for your complex simplicity
and your ethereal strict beauty.

And I thought then,
that even if you could not return my love,
it was enough to look at you.

your dark eyes have haunted me
ever since I first saw your face.

insatiable, smoldering, unfocused

I think, like an ant beneath a glass,
I would have burst into flames if you had looked directly at me.

I kept that photograph
and now that you're gone,

I admire you endlessly,
and long to be burned.

I wish you would put your colonialism into me
Political correctness be ******!

Flood my country with your spiced milk
and suffocate in sticky heat every sentiment
which is disagreeable to your southern sensibilities
So that our two societies might be of one mind
and enter into unbreakable alliance.

The scar, you said
was a physical reminder of "love"

I don't know who "loved" you,
or why they found it necessary

but I would have made it my life's work
to undo theirs.

"Enlightenment-Romanticist Complex", you called it,
my conflict of idealism and rationality

Like a doctor, you laid it out for me plainly
the nature of my illness, from which i was unlikely to recover

though somehow you, the eternal pessimist,
managed to harbor some hope that I would.

But tell me, love,
honestly
weren't you, yourself, still suffering from the same?

You looked forward to a full recovery,

but imagine how deliriously happy we could have been

in our little sick-bed.

"ama", you called me
word-play, of which you were so fond
meaning simultaneously
"maid" and "mistress", you said

if only we had not ripped each other to pieces,
i would have liked very much
to continue existing in that paradoxical state
and inspiring countless more.