sometimes it comes upon you like 

the crashing of a tidal wave. 

you don’t even hear the damned harbinger, and 

suddenly you’re drowning in its depths. you can’t breathe, 

 

your lungs burn. 

you beg to burn, too. 

 

sometimes it lays covered quietly in grace. 

you can almost convince yourself 

nothing’s changed at all. 

the rain still tastes the same as you lie 

on your back on the rooftop alone. 

semicolons still make you catch your breath 

and cut your words in half. 

you curse existing in the entropy of a femtosecond– 

a sigh, and the earth continues its rotation around the sun. 

 

sometimes it owns a body in the blood that streams from 

my wrists in the same place you cut your own. 

spilling profanity from the gaping hole in your head. 

crying as you shout the lord’s prayer 

on your knees with blackness streaming from 

your eyes. for god’s sake, where is god? 

 

but sometimes it burns brightly up your throat, in your eyes, 

rolling like cutting stones down your cheeks.  

folded into crinkled memorial pamphlets with your smiling 

face frozen in time on the cover–i think 

i saw your baby son’s empty teeth, 

do you miss him now? 

you’re tearing sobs from my chest that match 

the sound of my vessels shattering beneath skin as i’m 

tripping 

up the

stairs. 

 

i heard you. i saw you.

i know you left a body in new haven. 

 

my father tossed your memory in the trash. 

i know he couldn’t bear it–i couldn’t bear to stop him. 

i couldn’t do anything but scream 

at the flatline–because i know, i know the world soon forgets that

you ever lived at all.