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Poetry by Jason Haaf

I know that magick can exist.

I also know how much I repeat old habits.

Radical acceptance as pragmatic therapists say.

I see how much can be created when I separate myself from someone or something that feels like they're causing me too much emotion.

Looking at what is not healed and my resistance to what may come.

I have the ability to abstain from vices and pleasure, perhaps longer than others.

I can also dive straight into them, swim in them, wondering if I'll eventually drown in them. 

I have the ability to leave the past and places and people.  Never once have I felt homesick.  When all the kids in college were aching for familiarity, I couldn't relate because it wasn't felt.

I've always wanted, just once, to play a cold character in a movie.

What do I do with him? 

What do I do with the person I chose to make a ghost?

I knew he'd be my ghost if I let him.  I knew I'd see him in places where he was not.  What if it wasn't all up to me?

I might be learning another form of magick.

Does he stay my mind and moves through my ether because I'm his ghost?

"You don't know the difference between fiction and reality," he told me.

When I want out, I act on impulse.  I'll make big life choices and I've made people cry. 

What would I even say to him?

Do I need to bridge this rift?

What can happen if I do?

It wasn't love. 

It wasn't just friendship.

It wasn't sex.

It wasn't platonic.

What if I created a wasteland, a purgatory?  What if I let him have a say again?  Does that bridge a divide?

I have a sister who hates my mother but I still text her a happy birthday. 

I had a lover, once, who I saw and fucked nine years later.  After a few weeks, I watched him and my husband suck each other off as I stood at the edge of the bed.  I felt a phantom feeling of pain, but I knew what was happening was right.  Seeing the impossible. 

Do I need to befriend my phantom?

Does he still want to know me?

I saw him as much more than he was, I probably still do.  With all that I gave him, this phantom, he is just a man, a father and husband, who reads and idolizes his favorite writers in The New York Times.

Photographed by Patrick Lupinski

BIO: Jason Haaf is a writer and visual artist living in Brooklyn, New York. A believer in strong beginnings on paper and film, his works have appeared in Hello Mr. and Warm Brothers magazines, Rendering Unconscious: Psychoanalytic Perspectives, Politics & Poetry, The Trapartisan Review and Truant zine. He is the editor of Bent Book: a queerish anthology, and co-author of the artbook Watchword.  His debut novel, Harsh Cravings, is published by Polari Press.  Currently, he is producing an art novella: a collaboration combining painting, poetry, and prose.