Tuesday, February 13, 2007

photographs of dead friends

“Who’s this?”

That’s Simon. Took his mother’s sedatives
And then
Slit his wrists.
His mother was on the wrong side of a locked door
And as he bled to death
She called the police who came
Too late to save him because
They lived in the wrong part of town.

“What about him?”

Him? Greg hung himself
In the basement apartment that he lived in.
One week later
Someone set fire to the house
While his neighbours slept upstairs.
They lost everything but
Kept their lives.

“He looks happy.”

They all look happy in these pictures.
But Rodrigo didn’t kill himself.
He was an international rudeboy.
Had kids on two continents to prove it.
Someone stabbed him for revenge.
He also bled to death before the cops got there.

"What's her story?"

Brooklyn was a performer
But she didn't want the fame
Or anything that came with it.
Her friends found her when
She didn't answer her phone.
She used a rope.

In memory.

2 comments:

skyscraper said...

oh, whoa.

this poem is heavy, girl. heavy with sentiment, intensity, and throat-clenching truth (like what you talk about in the piece about your elephant--so, this is exactly the kind of writing that does that for me: one that's painfully true and able to touch the deepest, liveliest, most intense folds of one's heart and soul; that is raw and non-pretentious; that says what the poet feels and wants to convey without masking it or making it less graphic; that erects vivid, intense, and heart-wrenching images in one's mind because they are veracious).

this is the real, and the only real, writing that should be. this is the kind of self-expression that makes me cry and laugh from ecstasy of experiencing real life. from knowing that others also feel the things that i do.

thank you so much. it's priceless.

;))

lyric said...

this poem's important to me, because memory is so fragile. the reduction in significance that death brings on. i'm not a morbid person (not always anyway), but it is important for me to remember the dead. but what makes it incredibly painful is that these deaths didn't have to happen. and so i work to retain the memories, and i pass on the stories.

thank you,

l.