I finally know why I smoke.
For six years I have ****** tar
and I used to think
I wanted to **** myself
Just very slowly.
A painful, drawn out death that I,
indeed, deserve.
Now, I think, I symbolically
am setting fire to the feelings I have
Every day
And let the ash
fall to ground
while I walk away
feeling better.

Heal thyself poet
let words be your salve
let loose your longing
set free your sadness

Let them run wildly
over salt-damp parchment
Let them wail at the moon
and weep silently in corners

Throw them to the wolves
that your pain may sustain them
For it has nourished you
long enough

Let it all go.
Let it wrench from your soul
with glorious abandon
Let it scream from your lungs
Let it bleed through your skin

It matters not that you are broken,
that your scattered pieces hold no form
Only that you are here.

So write, dear poet.
Heal thyself.

They called me an iconoclast
Blessed
With a templar-like fervor,
Fueled by my devotion
To the intangible potentate, Logic --
Omnipresent, omnipotent.

But how could I be?
Not with Katarina and Bianca
Still resting in grottoes.
Not when I still stop by now and then,
Meandering in from my countless excursions,
Traipsing about in my mind,
To leave a few trinkets
And light some candles
And maybe a murmured prayer.

Those snapshots of memory
Revisiting me on rare occasions now,
But not a moment of recollection goes by
Without remembering
Katarina
Writhing beneath my grip,
Her slender fingers entwined with mine,
Or Bianca
Enclosing me in her warmth,
Her gnarled hands reeking of cigarettes.
Their I love yous, I like yous,
Whispers and kisses,
All branded on my skin.

No, sir.

Label me not
As one,
Not when I still keep their memories
On a pedestal,
Not when I still heave sighs
Of longing and fondness
To herald in nostalgia
And its hangers on,
Regret and despair,
However blasphemous.

An iconoclast I am not.
Anything but.
Revile me
For exalting heretics.

I deserve the rack and the stake
For becoming
Just as much a heretic
As the ones I was tasked to condemn.

I think
My tolerance for *******
Has reached its breaking point.

Now I spend my lunch hours
Squirreled away in the smoking room
Lost in tunes
Locked in with my thoughts
Scarfing down
One cigarette after another
And writing these ****** poems.

I don't care to hear
About the inanities of your sad lives.
It's all so bleak.
I feel most alone in a crowd.

I suppose
We all have our ways
Of coping
With the affliction of life.
Many seek refuge
In the mindless chatter of sheep
Others find their release
*****-deep in a wet hole
Or tasting blood and sweat
In the boxing ring
Or the warm, comforting embrace
Of alcohol.
Such blissful escape, all of them.
So what's wrong
With the hallowed cloisters
Of my mind?

**** the lot of you
With your petty dramas
******* hypocrisies
******* noises
Summoning up
The vilest contempt
Slumbering in me.

I am enough.

It started with a brofist
Interest fenced in
By the facade of indifference
Fueled by pride
And it ended with one.

Do you still remember
When we first met?
Us stealing glances at each other
You gnawing on your nicotine-stained nails
Me soaking in contrived nonchalance
Both of us clouding the air
With the static of bro, man, **** that, dude...
Supremely confident
In our juvenile, preconceived mastery
Of subterfuge.

How idiotic we both looked,
But how wise of us
To stay our hearts and tongues
With the ancient wisdom of abstinence.

You still sitting there
With half a heartful
Of words left unspoken -
Perhaps an apology was in there somewhere -
Staring in barely-concealed disbelief
At my abrupt flight,
I sensed your hesitation
As I waved goodbye
For the final time,
My back to you,
As I disappeared into the night.

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.