Suicide’s Note: An Annual

I hope you’ve been taken up by Jesus

though so many decades have passed, so far apart we’d grown

     between love transmogrifying into hate and those sad letters

           and phone calls and your face vanishing into a noose that

I couldn’t

     today name the gods

           you at the end worshipped, if any, praise being

impossible for the devoutly miserable. And screw my church who’d

     roast in Hell poor suffering

           bastards like you, unable to bear the masks

of their own faces. With words you sought to shape

     a world alternate to the one that dared

           inscribe itself so ruthlessly across your eyes, for you

could not, could never

     fully refute the actual or justify the sad heft of your body, earn

           your rightful space or pay for the parcels of oxygen you

inherited. More than once you asked

     that I breathe into your lungs like the soprano in the opera

           I loved so my ghost might inhabit you and you ingest my belief

in your otherwise-only-probable soul. I wonder does your

     death feel like failure to everybody who ever

           loved you as if our collective cpr stopped

too soon, the defib paddles lost charge, the corpse

     punished us by never sitting up. And forgive my conviction

           that every suicide’s an asshole. There is a good reason I am not

God, for I would cruelly smite the self-smitten.

     I just wanted to say ha-ha, despite

           your best efforts you are every second

alive in a hard-gnawing way for all who breathed you deeply in,

     each set of lungs, those rosy implanted wings, pink balloons.

          We sigh you out into air and watch you rise like rain.