For Anne

Most days I cannot remember the portion of happiness
exhaled by these lungs. The life in which you had nothing
against, where laying on its grass cut worse than razor
blades, suicide ’s restive aid.

You wrote in madness, a language as mercurial as that spoken by
an artist dictating pain to canvas, elucidating which red hue to fill
in hearts with, never questioning why a heart’s temper swings.

Infinite times, I have placed my contrived crux into a shoebox filled
with the same toxin that caused its abstraction; photographs shoot
stories as they are told, whose deaths will find comfortable deferment
time after time.

You possessed passing in the legacy you left bound. Two
days out for despair and three days out in a mental hospital is
all it took you. All prayers fall short in revitalizing Poet from
your remains, as I step over the edge into the same darkly afflicted
end point.

Suicides deceive the human form; birth betrays the trust of those who
commit the crime concluding the lives they have lived, survived
as long as possible. Still-born births are presented privilege, immunized
against the fight for normalcy in a world where depression is inherent and
gangrene develops in the mind, invulnerable to antiseptic cleansing.

Death’s a sad bone, yes, but living pauses in the pale undoing of any
sores: new, old, or resting somewhere in between. Voluntary erasure
offers balance to cold; the creation of words stamp out numb from
tender living, offering balance to the beautifully frightened ones—
dying to take the next steps towards the perfect suicide: independence
from the echoes of anxiety printed in the obituary of a Poet’s
leftover metaphors.