Wired Messiah

Once a year I write to you now;

once a year immersing myself

in the suddenly unfamiliar recollection that you are gone and staying gone.

Like an apology. "Sorry you're still dead",

as though sooner or later you might get better,

or otherwise that I might get worse enough to visit.

Sorry you're still dead.

Sorry I'm so fucking morbid about it.

Anyway, what to tell you now?

The trees still turn bare in the autumn

and come alive again in the spring, much the same way you do not,

and what to tell you now?

My hair came back – longer than ever. You'd have liked it.

I laugh a little more like you. Funny the things you'll do

to keep someone in the world,

and what to tell you now?

The days still carve a little more away from me, chips of gravel

striking the face of a chemical sculptor as I become

smoother round the edges or perhaps

better formed or maybe just

some new thing entirely who knows but

you, beloved flash of pink and noise in the world, remain unchiselled,

and what to tell you now?

I wish you could meet who I'm becoming. She still loves you.

Anyway, what to tell you now?

You're the only thing about me that doesn't change anymore.

Sorry you're still dead.

Everyone you know making appointments with the doctor,

everyone you know dying a little faster. Getting acquainted

with the taste of 4 in the morning. Bitter, like blood pooled

in the mouth. Heartbreak stacked on heartbreak with no in

terlude. Can't tell one from the other anymore. Faster now,

faster, and scream if you want to get off the ride. But you c

annot, of course, get off the ride. Mindfulness tips from a t

herapist with eyes staring off somewhere else. Promises to do

better. To who? For what? Fascism out the window, fascism h

anging from a streetlight outside your door, fascism goose-ste

pping through the muffled sound of your hands over your ea

rs. Wondering if you will last long enough for the pretty nam

e you have chosen to feel like your own. How it sounds to be

underwater. How it sounds to be drowning. Knife in the draw

er calling to you every day. Promises to do better. A little dog

you can't let down. A grave with someone else's name on it. R

omanticising the idea of staying alive. Romanticising the idea

of dying. Seeing which one wins today. Everyone will forget e

ventually, excepting the fact that you now know they will not.

Promises to do better. Getting acquainted with the taste of 4 i

n the morning. The ringing in your ears. Your arms folding ar

ound empty space. Your dead friend calling your name from t

he photo on your bedside. Saliva turning stale in your mouth.

One day I will write about the leaves falling

for the last time. How they surrender

without complaint or regret. Walking through the park, I notice

that some things are much more ready to die than others. In a house

that still refuses to feel like home, you try not to let your lips meet mine,

and I thank whatever little blessing is left

that you can't help it.

And on a summer afternoon like any other,

giddy with the feeling of you beside me,

you kissed the scars on my arm

and it felt like grace.

What now can the cold and the dark offer me that could compare?

And speaking of falling apart: all the rest of it,

in everyone I love and everywhere I look the dry-leafed dissolution

takes hold, atomic bonds snapping

like elastic under too much strain. Crunching underfoot. I wonder if

we would all still want anything

if it wasn't so damn hard to keep it.

Anyway,

it's a long way to say the only thing I have to say:

I wish you were here.

On a sunny May evening I go outside to the garden

and with nothing particular in mind

decide to linger there for a minute.

I watch the trees catching the wind

that sweeps higher than the grey-tiled terraces around me,

see their shadows dancing

on a tattered red-brick wall

a few feet before my eyes. I think about every time

I have wished away the same skin stirring against the stroke of this breeze.

Pointed the same eyes,

now mesmerised by a thin-branched shadowplay, at a mirror

and yearned for the thing inside it to go away forever.

What I have indelicately done to myself with these hands

could not be further away

while my chin rests dreamily upon them.

You can get a little drunk on the promise

of a cool evening on a warm day.

Fall in love with living a little bit more.

You can spend that moment praying that it's enough next time -

praying you still have enough in you next time.

June,

I love my beautiful dead things, but show me some life. Show me it can still happen.

Bring me seafoam from the Atlantic, carry it to me through the canopies

of exploding verdancy and run salt through my hair with your fingers.

The air sticky with smothering pollen,

I'll take it all and line my lungs with it.

July,

give me that wonderful word: “sun-kissed”. Yes, even me, even me. Don't hold back.

No-one ever touched the sky without getting burned, and you can turn my shoulders

red as the dawn if that's what it means for you to hold them.

Let me never again say maybe

when the voice of my heart says yes, yes, yes. I have rushed

too gladly into fires, and will do so again, because

if there is an easier way to live, then it is a lesser one.

August,

those warm amber evenings, the stillness of heat hanging there like a lover at the door.

Linger a little longer. You don't know what moment will be your last, and

my hands have forgotten every shape that isn't clinging on,

grasping for just a second more.

Mine's one more drink before we head back home,

one look back so you never forget me,

one more day like this

to keep you warm

I hear the sound of laughter and I want to be where it is:

just out the window, a million miles away, where there's

noise and life and people and joy, and everyone in the world

is having fun without you.

In a crowded room I want

my shoulders to graze against every shoulder here,

to be welcomed by this living, breathing thing - but then

I catch a sharp edge and bleed. Recoil and hide, retreat

and regroup. Maybe if I'm just a little softer next time, maybe-

I bite my tongue.

I write letters I'll never send. I leave it all alone.

Better to shiver through the cold

than pass your hand through the fire.

Better to wait for someone's heart

to break into the shape that will fit yours.

Better to eat your own sins,

dinner for one.

But we all want to be deserving, so

in conference with the stars

I ask the night sky if it's possible

to love something without hurting it -

if you try hard enough,

if you promise to keep trying,

Two years gone, and I'm still getting to know you.

The pictures you took in the hospitals, keeping a diary

of the last face you'd ever show the world.

These were the places where you realised

that no-one was going to save you.

The bones are showing through your skin. There's no light left in your eyes.

I wonder how far back I'd have to go to see it again.

The first time I saw you -

I mean, literally, the first time. Call it 2007.

Hair half way down the back of your school shirt.

I thought to myself: "Wow. That's some long hair."

No-one ever knows who will hurt them or how.

The last time I saw you -

I mean, literally, the last time.

A hug in the front of your car on my way out.

Maybe I kissed your forehead. That's something, isn't it?

Can't it be?

And everything in between -

the nickname you gave me

(I think you knew more than you let on)

and the adoration you poured into it

every time. Every time. It's still yours and no-one else's.

It's still the first name that was really mine.

Your mum comforts me while I cry over the photographs you took,

tells me no-one could have done anything. Even from her,

I take and take and take,

and even to her

I cannot express the enormity of what I don't deserve to feel.

I'm still in the world, the way you are until you're not,

haunting that town of 'used to be',

passing by the empty banks and abandoned shops.

You're waiting for me down the road:

the seat in front of mine in our old classroom;

at the train station;

in the front of your car,

calling to me. The sound of your voice sweeps behind me with the wind,