Dear friend,
look what
happened
to us.
Open up your eyes.
When poets scream, you feel it in your chest.
The tearing of things dying up close. It hurts like steel screeching on slate.
Read. The words go into you, live virii. Camouflaged in sugar and soft pillowed invitations. Then you're the victim ten seconds after consumption, seeing the label, knowing there are things ahead you don't want to face.
But you gotta.
She takes the car and blows up the house. She takes all the memories and leaves him with extension cords connecting nothing to electricity. She burns the books. Shreds the pictures he once snapped expecting to care about that moment. She forgets the dreams he had so deep his soul would drain out if they went away. Things weren't going to be the way he always thought they would.
Never are.
When poets cry, build yourself from melancholy. Die without dying. Murder most foul. The bread knife in his hands while she slides to the floor, her vessels severed; being killed doesn't hurt as much as the idea of it. You know. What you know.
Open up your eyes. You should have seen it before he wrote it, you know. You could have just not read it and been horrified. Then he put it inside you.
Dear heart, what you don't know I'll force into you. There are things about being hurt that can't be learned. They're seen. They're felt in muted tones like music from a poorly tuned radio. They're felt by someone else.
See this sun. See this neck. See this bridge, the rope, the stone.
He wasn't born to live this way. No baby decides on self-destruction until he grows old enough to look at himself in the world and fear the hate in the reflection.
And you didn't see it until everyone saw something go over the rail--then the red and blue spinning lights at the house. The note, just for you.
Run to the yellow police lines with the answer in your hand, waving the paper that ends it. It was all written down. They were screaming and now his sound is inside you and you can't get it out. Nobody will listen. Case closed. It's over for them.
Just starting for you.
Love makes a man write what he dreams. When the dreams are dead, only the writing lives.
Fear makes a man kill what he loves. When love is dead, the survivors are left standing at the periphery of the crater, their heads full of words.
Once you've read them, they become you.