Well, I’ve never broken down in tears on stage, but this one hit me hard right in the middle.This is a departure from my usual work, but, it’s something that I think needs to be said.  I said sometimes it seems like having the soul of a poet is like having an open wound.  I just feel things, very deep, so deep that when I try to shake it, it rattles around, but won’t get out of my head until I write it or perform it…and even then.. it isn’t always exorcised.

 

 

Damn it Mr. Williams

 

Damn it Mr. Williams

 

Why the fuck.

 

Why don’t we cry for a person

When they’re still alive?

Why when they’re hurt,

Can’t we do more than make a face

and say ‘I sympathize’

 

 

Why doesn’t another person’s pain touch us until they’re gone?

 

Why can’t take away another person’s pain at all?

 

And why are people with such a depth of empathy, the tenderest caring souls who let the world truly touch them,

treated as though they’ve lost their minds,

Even before they lose their minds.

 

The end of life is death,

and death should make the story arc complete,

but sometimes,

it doesn’t.

it feels as if when a person commits suicide their lives become a book with the last chapters torn out.

 

Damn it Mr. Williams, Damn it Ms. Monroe,

Damn it Hemmingway and Mr. Conaway and Gray

and Thompson, Plath, Hutchence, and Woolfe and Cobain

And Van Gogh

And everyone who ever killed themselves,

because, there was more story

 

And Damn it Justin

And Damn it my cousin

And Damn it my friend in high school

 

And I can’t judge

 

Damn it Me

 

I considered it too, so many times,

Stood right at the edge and looked down,

It looks so easy on TV

 

But it’s not

It’s hard to override the body’s overwhelming need to self preserve

When a person truncates their own fate, it has taken every last part of them to fight for that break.

 

I’ve driven blind,

and sped through bottles of pills,

 

never really attempting

still challenging death to take me

but I’m not hers yet.

 

I took the fear and the queasy chest

The endorphin high of pushing too far too fast as evidence that even though death was standing so very near,

That the fear was in some way,

a desire to live.

 

When you’re dead, you can’t change anyone’s mind anymore

And you can’t change you’re own ever again either.

 

If the one constant of existence is change

Even when the possibility of change doesn’t matter to me anymore,

I know objectively that will change too

 

Some suicides are selfish,

they don’t think about anyone else’s harm

 

But some care too much

Because an open heart

can be an open vein gushing empathy and love

 

The church has it wrong

these will be saints too

Because saints, are people who give everything

Giving so much, but not knowing how to accept the same gifts in return

Is suffering

 

Damn it Mr. Williams,

Damn it Robin, can I call you Robin?

and damn them whoever they are

The people or molecules in your brain, who pushed you to break and not bend.

Damn it

I wish you had just one more change of mind, one more chapter.

 

You were author to a book,

No one but the writer wanted to end.