Reading about the paranormal,
The unknown,
Hearing of ghosts and spirits --
It hurts.

The otherworldly
Stirs up the painful memories
Of you.
I'd rather feel
Horror and fear
Anything else but this.

The demonic
The satanic
Can do little else to me
That you haven't already done.

Ghostly visitations,
Hauntings,
UFOs and their merry little abductions --
They all remind me of you
Still lurking my nights

When people trade stories
About aswang and demonic possession,
Cattle mutilations in the middle of nowhere,
I get chills
Thinking of you.

You are as inscrutable
As the Works of the Old Men
As the Nazca Lines
As the Coseck Circle.
Deciphering the Voynich Manuscript
Is nothing compared to the puzzle of you.

Listening to UVB-76
Max Headroom
The Bloop
Rebecca Black
Makes more sense than listening to you.

Unmask Jack the Ripper
Explain the Toynbee Tiles
Solve the Taman Shud Case
And I can solve you.

It's far less taxing, really
And more merciful on my limited cognitive faculties.

Bring me the Mongolian death worm
And Spring-heeled Jack
The Wandering Jew
The Dover Demon
And the Am Fear Liath Mòr
Before I decide
That sympathy and love
Are more that mere legends
Roaming the windswept wastes
Of your icy, shriveled heart,
Closer to reality than cryptozoology.

Abandoned cities and colonies
Only remind me of how abruptly and senselessly you left,
Leaving me a decrepit mystery of ruins

You believed in Atlantis
I said it was Plato's illustration --
His Republic,
Like Augustine's City of God.

Perhaps this was why our Atlantis
Sank to the ocean floor --
We were just good on paper.
Or maybe we started slaughtering
Noble half-breeds and changelings wholesale
Out of a misplaced sense of pride,

Or our union was unholy
And rankled the senses of the Sovereign
Who deemed it an offense
And thus condemned it,

Or perhaps this was an act of mercy
The equivalent of what Lovecraft said
The most merciful thing
Is the inability of the human mind
To correlate all the ******* he encounters
And has to deal with
On a daily ******* basis.

That the solid waves of mindfuck,
Pushing and heaving like tides,
Emanating from little ole you,
Would have finished off
Whatever was left of my mind.

You believed in ******* everything
But us.
Lost continents
Fox spirits
Psychometry
Were-boars
The ******* occult
No problem
All that which science cannot quantify nor qualify
You embraced
Yet you ran from me
And into the arms of another.

You claimed to be an empath
So tell me
How do I feel
After what you did to me?

You tell me.

And isn't empathy
Supposed to make people more compassionate?

The **** is this, then?

These stories
Of yetis and apparitions
Poltergeists and precognition
Used to intrigue and thrill me as a child.
When I grew up
I started ignoring them.
You put meaning back into the whole thing,
However insipid.

I was a skeptic.
You walked the line
Between the physical and supernatural
At least
If what you said is to be believed.

You were nothing but a specter,
Luring another hapless soul
Out into the barren wastelands
With a *** of stew,
Just beyond reach,
To its doom.

You're nothing but a ghost
Of an angry girl
Murdered by the cruelty
Of your parents and the church
And now I'm one of your victims.

Now as I start to see
Faint vistas of the supernatural,
They start to run
With memories of you
Until I can no longer
Distinguish one from the other.

So I'll ignore the glimpses
Of lurid phantasmagorias
And lock myself in
My world of letters and literature
Of armlocks and flying elbows
Of video games and liquor
I will pretend your world never existed.

Please, please keep out of mine.

I thought you loved me.

I had so many things planned for us.
I still had so much left to give.

But you left anyway.
Now what am I to do
With these plans
All this love
But to fling them out
To be trampled by pigs
And eaten by birds

You lied to me.
You're cruel.
And why would I want to remain friends
With someone that selfish?

I tried to show you
That I wasn't like him
Blind to the fact
That you're just like her.

I've done nothing wrong
Except give my heart
And love wholly -
Something I will never do again

When I departed
Who knew
It was for the final time.
Perhaps it was for the best.
That's what I tell myself
In an attempt
To ease the sting
Of your abandonment.

A star is a star, after all
Meant to roam the frigid emptiness of space
To blaze and shine
Through the barren loneliness
And inspire bards and priests and murderers
Here on my patch of dirt

And this neanderthal
Was meant to walk this humble rock.
To vie for the heavens
Is blasphemy.
This simple-minded caveman
Can do nothing else in his grief
But perhaps
To find something more worthy
For which to paint his crude smudges
On the walls of his hovel.

The girl who captured my heart
And held my hand
And kissed my cheek so sweetly
Died back there
With my final vestiges of hope
In The Land of the Morning Calm.

Explore my mind
I beg of you
Walk the landscape of my psyche
Until your feet are nothing
But a bleeding pile of blisters

I'll expose you to all the truly inane **** I can dwell on
I'll show you the ugliness of my soul
The depths of depravity
To which I am willing to sink

I open myself to you for examination
For your scrutiny
Know me inside and out

And then tell me
If I still interest you
If you can still call my mind beautiful

I'll bare everything
In a desperate bid to drive you off
See if you can handle
The crushing depths of the boredom I can inflict

Because if you're just going to tire of me eventually
Get bored and walk off
To find the next stimulation
For your mind and soul
Then I'd rather you do it to me sooner
Than later
Even though I will never be the first
To leave.

A few more days
And we'll find ourselves
Sharing laughs once again
Lighting each other's cigarettes
Flipping each other the bird
Exchanging stupid grins
And holding hands
As we pontificate
And argue
And muse
On both the metaphysical and the mundane.

Looking at the same moon
Smoking when you smoke
Subsisting on digital hugs and kisses
(A sad parody of the real thing)
Pictures and memories

This is what we've been reduced to.
It's maddeningly frustrating
But I must endure.
(Something this old man is getting better at.)

It's not so bad
Anticipating your calls
To hear about the adventures of your day
About who you met up with
How many guys checked you out or hit on you
How many shots you polished off
And just to hear
The sound of your hello
Your *******, dude's
And your refreshingly innocent giggles.
Not bad at all.

It's better than nothing
While I'm counting the days
I stretch my hours
And inch sleep back
With Sylvia Plath and writing these little poems
To meet you in those tiny windows
Crowded in
By our time zones and sleeping habits

Succumbing to slumber
Only to be prodded awake
By the wailing of the phone
And finally
Plucking it out of the darkness

Just to hear
A voice
Your voice
Mellowed by sleep
Your inhibitions crippled by alcohol
Whispering little morsels of affection
And singing out trembling yawns
Moments before sleep claimed you from me

And I'm alone again in the dark

But smiling this time.

Virtual hugs ****,
You said.
This ******* distance
The longing
And all the
I miss you's
And image files
And sound bites
That mean the best
But don't do jack ****
To bring us an inch closer

I know.

Patience, my love.
Just a few more days.

Her hands told me everything
More than her piercing eyes
More than her articulate words
Ever could

They sang
Of realms crisscrossing
This ancient earth

Every crease
And there were many
Whispering forgotten lores

She is a portal
To different worlds
Strange dimensions
Where the fae dwell
And demons lurk

I don't know how
To dispel the legion
Shadowing her
Or how
To drive off her demons
But to be there
To listen
To love
To hold
As she searches
For answers
For meaning
To the colossal questions
That slipped through the
Cold balance sheet of life
Too deep to fit
Into its little cubicles
And neat labels

Torn between desire and fear
Do I advance?
Do I flee?

If I stay
And she tires of me
What then?

If I run
And wound her
What then?

You're stupid
They told me
For hesitating.
Go
They said.

You're a fool
They told me
For making the wrong choice.
Turn back
They said.

You're crazy
They told me
She's a free spirit.
You need to tame her
They said.

One does not harness a star
One does not subjugate a heavenly body

I may have grown roots
And she, wings
Nevertheless
I wait for her
To make her nest in me.

For even birds seek a perch
And foxes seek refuge

Now
As normalcy resumes
And our time slowly unreels
Inside my head
Crowding out all else
All that occupies me
Are her hands
Rough, calloused, and scalding
And beautiful with an unspoken tenderness
And millennial wisdom
Locked with mine.

She said
I like your mind

What I should have replied with was
I like you.
You are the night sky to my mind's cavemen
An enduring thing of wonder
Inspiring tales and legends and worship
And all that jazz.

Should have.
I would be mad to bare myself
Just to wither under her gaze of supreme boredom.
A man cannot embrace a star
To dance in her purifying flames
To cavort in pure energy
And live to tell the tale.

All mortals can hope for
Are those dark interludes of breathless awe
At the fearful display of the heavens

I was never meant to walk on her surface
And explore her depths
To foster such ambitions
Is to court death
To plunge into immolation

After a night of slack-jawed gazing
I have to do nothing else but retreat back into my cave
And paint on the walls.

After you left
My cigarettes tasted dull
The electricity in the air vanished
And my thoughts lost their luster
How could I frolic in the playground of my mind
When your voice still echoes
Bouncing around
From dank nook to dusty corner
And stirs and disturbs
Tired emotions
Long meant to be put to rest.

******* on my **** stick
On the abandoned sidewalk
I can still see us
Five feet away
Breathing each other's smoke
Beaming smiles at passing cars
Exchanging inanities
While I gorged
On lies of grins and fraternal love.

At the hazy bottom of the bottle
Later that night
Is when I realize
I only exist
In between our hellos and goodbyes.