what did you expect from these red lips?

“Grasses found in meadow and moorland of Great Britain.” Harmsworth’s Universal encyclopedia. n.d. Color added.

I’m sick. I want to be re- membered for the absence

my body made in space.

Baby, put the gun down.

I know, okay, I know. I know the smooth curve of it in your hand feels something like control, feels something like want and power and things you have not felt for years and years and pills and pills and poems and poems and poems. I know it is your scepter, I know it is your crown, I know you are so fucking desperate to grab this bull by the fucking horns and get your life back – or get your life over with. I know, okay, babe? I know.

But, baby, you’ve got to listen: put the gun down.

You weren’t made for bullet holes and funeral bells. You weren’t made for that crumbling headstone: here you lie, rest in peace, you were beloved, beloved, you were beloved. No, God, you weren’t made for belated beloveds, so, baby, please. Put the gun down.

Put that goddamn fucking gun down, don’t you understand? Oh, God, you were made for summer nights and slamming headboards into the wall and buying peppermint lattes and chewing on lemon rinds. You weren’t fucking made for silence and rot, you were made for kissing, kissing, kissing, you were goddamn made for kissing, babe, don’t you fucking understand? You were made to be held so fucking fiercely the sky cracked, you deserve a better lover than a coffin lid and a stony silence, God, you deserve someone who thinks you are infinite and vast and so fucking beautiful they can’t breathe. Do not call your wrists weak – they have hefted mountains and moved boulders to let your blood flow through, so, baby, baby, don’t you fucking dare pull that trigger, don’t let your strength spill like the waters of the Amazon basin, you are so much better than this. Yes, you are, yes, you are, yes, you are.

So, baby, listen to me:

Put down the gun. There will be bad days and there will be good days and there with be beauty and pain and joy and girls and boys and kisses and punches and a lot of the time you will feel very, very broken and very, very lonely. But you have to remember that you have such potential. You are so very fucking strong and so very fucking brave and I love you so very fucking much. Don’t go searching for happiness in triggers and ropes and pills – there are no winners in those kinds of games. Search instead for seventy-degree days and the first snowfall of the year and the way ground coffee smells and how good you’re going to look with a wedding ring on. I swear to God, there is a happy ending somewhere in here, and it’s not down the barrel of that gun.

So, baby, please.