scratch disk, a poem

(content/trigger warning: macabre depictions of suicide)

when they find me, they won't know how to write my elegy.

they won't know what to say.

they won't know who I was.

because I certainly didn't know.

play.

pause.

from start,

to end.

I lived a life in the present.

you'd think of that as a good thing,

but it was not of my own volition.

if only.

step forward.

step backward.

stop.

loop.

I loathed the past,

I feared the future.

every memory, inflated to a draconian monster.

I could not stand the life I lived.

scrub.

skim.

draft.

render.

and thus I pushed it out.

the memorie­s left me through blood and tear stains.

a corpse, stained with them,

inaccessible, hiding.

corrupt.

offline.

replace.

ignore.

I could not have told you what the last five years of my life were like.

I could not have told you ­what the last year of my life was like.

I could not have told you what the last days of my life were like.

come curtain call, it was all feedback and noise, at a screeching crescendo.

exeunt.

monologue.

bow.­

exit.

twitching and convulsing,

a final pardon from the numbing monotony.

frame-by-frame, I fell away.

running out of space in my lungs, not to be initialized.

­

get out.

go away.

leave me.

you don't want me here.

a ghost relinquished, I'm finally at ease.

I stop and smell the daisies over my head.

in a place of decay, I can move past my fractured mind.

there is no time postmortem. that's all I had hoped for.

Valerie Gitlow

270125