The Suicide (Extended Version)

take it from me,

from a boy with blood under his fingernails

august comes too fast,

too soon

sweeps you up like a lover,

carries you over the unwanted threshold of summer

we find ourselves lost

in the sun

in a new love

in a discarded beer bottle

i haunt my own home now

weep on the stairs

wander aimlessly at night

i sing strange and sad songs

when everything is quiet you can hear me whispering

get out get out get out

someone once said

they thought ghosts were less an echo of the past

and more a crossing over of the strands of time

i hope whoever i am crossed with doesn't mind me

i speak to them sometimes

i'm sorry i'm sorry i'm sorry

i eat the apple you gave me with a knife

all my water tastes like charcoal

all charcoal tastes like cigarettes

all cigarettes taste like you

i clutch my can like its a lifeline

because it is

i am a boy held together

by cigarette ash and lies

strung out on a piece of red string

stretched across a pinpricked cork board

i watch by the side of the road

as the collision knocks you to the ground

"how do you live like this?" she asks

i want to tell her that i love it

that the dirt and the squalor holds me close at night

whispers sweet nothings in my ear

tells me it is all okay

but i don't

"i don't live like this" i say

and it is a lie

but how do i explain the rot to her?

how do i explain the rot to you?

how do we live without our ghosts?

how can i live with mine?

my brother looks older today

like a man

i am older too

so old my bones creak

like the floors of my house

we are all just growing up

the clock breathes another breathless hour into the corpse of my room

i lie awake at night and wonder about you

we all wonder about you

we all wander about

"you're holding on for dear life"

they say (without saying it)

"your fingers are black and blue"

i laugh and shrug and make some witty comment

i can't tell them about this

about all of this

how do we tell the people we love about the things that we hate?

we don't.

we put a cork in the bottle and keep the ship wrecked forever in the tempered glass.

it's safer in there

the bodies all contained

i bury my ghosts at the bottom of this bottle

this is how i live without them

this is how i live with them

i breathe and breathe and breathe

it all keeps going and rolling in on itself

like some great unmanned tide

you snatch the bottles off the shelves

you want to see what's inside

but the cork is stuck, so you pocket the bottles instead

ignoring the clinking in your bag

i do not stop you

if you take the bottles then the grief is not mine

if the grief is not mine

then neither are the ghosts

neither is the rot

neither are the creaky floorboards

please take it

don't make me sit with it

take it from me,

take it from me,

take it from me.