Head-cold.

I always thought the more educated I was  
the more skill I'd have  
but Edgar Allan Poe is killing me, drowning me in his bile and I have to sit there and take it like a submissive in the sheets.  
 
It could have been Shakespeare, or WW2 poetry,  
this I could have coped with, even excelled at, but him?  
There's nothing I enjoy about his work  
and certainly nothing I like about the way his work influences me.  
 
My writing's not even morbid now, it's written like a child wrote it  
whilst staring out the window ignoring a poetry lesson  
and to be fair, maybe that's how it happened.  
 
Maybe I've lost my skill and replaced it with  
the "normal" things like wanting to hide all day,  
and the sticky, stagnant depression that leaks into the bones -  
 
I struggle to write about myself for this for fear that once it's out  
I can't take it back  
and I'll have fucked it and I'll have been the one to fire the final bullet into the inspiration. How can anyone take that guilt?  
 
I used to have a muse, something I could write about until my fingertips bled,  
until my head was exploding on self-harm and a cocktail of pills.  
I used to have a muse, you know, the type of individual who would run and come back and run and come back.  
 
Well, that's done now and I got tired of waiting. What's worth that kind of heart-ache? What fraudulent intentions were his?  
Not that it matters.  
 
I always thought that the more educated I was the more skill I'd have  
and I know, people giving me critical evaluation is all to help, but I don't feel like part of this writing world any more.  
I don't know why I bother,  
 
I lack the skill and the time, even the patience to read the novices who make spelling, spacing and grammatical errors and call it skill while their "friends" unkindly tell them it compares to Hemingway and Bukowski, Thomas. This hinders their space to improve.  
 
See? I am bitter and sometimes that instigates a superb poem or two.  
In my case it just means I'll rot from the inside out and in the mean time I'll stand at the washing up bowl,  
or study, or be in front of a mirror putting on a face that looks older than mine.  
 
I'm in love with this man, and I know it doesn't mean anything to you but it needs to be said,  
I didn't expect it, he's not a writer by trade and we aren't those star-crossed lovers you come across in books.  
 
It feels alien but necessary. Why do you have to kill yourself for art?  
Why can't you be a typical level of happy and write a decent piece? I now wonder whether that's possible.  
 
But this here, I'm not writing for the credit,  
I don't want it and it's not worth it. I'm not going to make myself ill over art, I refuse to self-destruct for a piece -  
 
it's wrong, self-indulgent and tiresome.  
I always thought the more educated I was  
the more skill I'd have and maybe that's true in terms of common sense and brutal truth.  
 
I spit and I spit on the responses of many, I don't mean to, believe me, but with poetry, any writing, it is still all about having the right connections at the right time  
and Poe taught me that.  
 
It pisses on my efforts, lusting for perfection, and the need to improve and achieve. I don't want to be a pariah, nor a butterfly,  
I want to be human, I want to live and I want to die.