memorial
C3
Smudging my own lines
in the hopes of a smile
daring to grace your face
and arrive on your lips.
I tried to make life seem easy.
Hopefully, for you, it mostly was.
F14
you’re right, the way I pulled myself out of my cage,
my self-induced suffering,
was sudden and abrupt and sloppy.
you’re right, the way I discovered myself
was as if I’d unceremoniously poured gasoline on your heart
cozied up and struck a match
and set fire to your soul that my skin would burn my proximity.
you’re right that the feelings that fill me up these days
seem illogical, but
that’s always been who I am all along, hasn’t it?
Now I know I should not have ignored your protests to my perspective,
much too late.
C19
I decided suicide was on my side two months before I came to
and I shed tears the day I decided not to go to the riverbed
and I shed tears the day I decided to play with chemicals
not because it was the day I doomed us.
Us being you and me;
the you and me that found a way through slurred speech,
stepping on nails,
hospitalizations,
deathbeds,
and darkness.
No, I shed tears for becoming a poppy seed,
when my true identity was a galaxy,
and I shed tears the day I realized
I’d been killing myself for years and years and years.