Up In Smoke → Poem by Mikayla S.

I lit the world on fire,

watched it go up in smoke,

smelled the scent of ashen rose,

passion decomposed,

and dared to question the purity of the oxygen,

but I swallowed my tongue,

secrets like cigarettes,

one puff and I’d choke.

This pyromaniac who stole a match,

he set my heart ablaze,

but he didn’t have water to put out the flames,

so I burned and burned,

he didn’t say a word.

I never liked to destroy,

rather create with my mind,

but I had a habit of falling for ne’er-do-wells,

putting myself through hell,

all for fulfilling an aching void where my heart once resided,

so I took his things that he left in the wake of the flame.

His favorite shirt,

photographs that harbored painful memories,

a thrifted teddy bear left in the dirt,

and all the poems I wrote―

doused in kerosene,

lit on fire,

and I watched it go up in smoke.

Meet the pyromaniac’s demise,

I am the water putting him out,

keeping the embers dancing about for myself,

leaving him to die in a scorching wasteland,

now he understands when I said that I was just as capable of destruction,

just because I didn’t hurt people the way he did,

I had my own ways of making my presence known,

in the aftermath of this warfare,

I walk out of it alone,

watching from the mountains as our world goes up in smoke.

Up In Smoke