line breaks

i dont think this is a poem. but it has line breaks and it’s very sad so maybe it counts. not all of my poems wind up being sad but all of my sadness winds up being poetry so here’s what wound up on the page in the mean time

You have or you haven’t. You are or you aren’t. You are dead, not alive, and we know this, we know this, I know this, I have lived with this on all the days since you left me. This was going to be a poem but I didn’t like the line breaks. I didn’t want there to be 

Line breaks. See? See what it does? Takes a sentence and hollows it for me, warps the meaning (or doesn’t, or couldn’t) and loses your name in the fractures. I’m sick of writing like this. I’m sick of being a writer not a necromancer, sick of looking at a word which works and thinking too many syllables, sick of asyndeton and repetition and writing like your death has to be something which works on the page. Because you can’t start a sentence with because and you can’t say the word because too much in a sentence anyway because it sticks out and sounds bad and anyone who knows anything knows enough to see that something here is wrong.

Because you died. And it isn’t poetry, I don’t want it to be poetry, I don’t want it to be anything but I can’t talk about it if I don’t talk about it and I don’t talk about it so I write about it and I can’t write unless it reads right. Good. You called me a wordsmith and I took that to heart, so it’s your fault really. Doubly your fault because you also died. Which wasn’t your fault. But it was. It was. You left me.

You left me. Another line break, another shard of stupid repetition which I’m calling a shard because piece isn’t poetry, or it is, it’s all poetry, piece and peace and homophones but it’s not how I’d write it, and maybe that makes this all my fault because if I wasn’t me and this wasn’t a story I was living in then isn’t it the truth that I’d have killed you off? For the narrative. For the tragedy. Not enough ever happened around here until you fucking died you selfish bastard my editor would absolutely say holy moly cool it on the expletives but as it happens I am also sick of punctuation so here here here can you read this can you hear it can you swallow it down

There would’ve been a question mark there but I can’t very well end an anti-punctuation diatribe with a piece of punctuation. None of this makes sense. I know. I know. I am so dehydrated the world is shiny and my head doesn’t hurt but give it like half an hour, just give me half an hour, just come back to me for let’s say five minutes and I’ll stop going on tangents mid-lament about punctuation and line breaks and I’ll probably instead just do something stupid like waste every five-minute millisecond carding my hands through your stupid blonde hair. I think I’d kiss your forehead and you’d wrinkle your nose and say what the fuck was that about but I also don’t know if I’m just assigning you that aloofness to maybe take away from how guilty I am of never holding you close. Maybe if I’d kissed your mouth you’d have let me but I never tried; I never knew. I knew you. Not

Your mouth. I lie about the things that I’ve hoped for. I say maybe if I say your name enough times then it loses its meaning but I obviously don’t want that, I would never want that, your name has five letters so it’s my first guess in the fucking Wordle every morning but even that never managed to take away from the very basic fact in my hand that I miss you. There is no fact in my hand that’s a stupid image but I’m writing at a mile a minute and I don’t know why. I miss you. I miss you. I think I started writing this because I wanted to make some stupid poetic statement about Ed Spencer Who Killed You finally going to prison for what he did, but in my head he isn’t Ed Spencer Who Killed You he’s just Ed who was in our year 7 tutor group so now what? The news paints him evil and I know that that’s what I’m supposed to think too — I’m angry enough that you’re dead, so shouldn’t I hate him? The answer is yes, obviously, the answer is that I should hate him like your mother does and find a whole lot more solace than I do in the fact of his imprisonment. That’s justice. Maybe it isn’t.

 I remember now. It was the articles and your name. Your mum prioritised your privacy which is good thank God she did thank God your name wasn’t splashed over the bodies of the BBC articles that I read like I’m addicted but they mention the victims and then they don’t mention you. Never your name and never your face. It makes me sick and that means I’m backwards, grieving backwards, is that a thing? Have I made it a thing?

You’re dead. This isn’t an end and I don’t really want to end it but that’s what we’ve got, that’s what I’m missing. You died in the past tense and you are dead in the present and you’re still going to be dead forever in the future so there. There. Let me hold you. Let me save you. Let me put your name in the articles and write you down in a way which doesn’t have to be poetry and let me walk back into your childhood bedroom and smell the dark air with the cats in it. I don’t know how to talk about all the things I want to talk about, I never have. I’m not dying but my head is moving too fast, something is wrong, something is always wrong, two years now (almost exactly since your funeral, today is the 12th of May, I want to put my hand against your coffin again) and something has been wrong this whole time really. It’s you. Interminably you.

You’re dead. I can’t escape it, can’t escape you, can’t escape not wanting to. I write it down; I make you poetry; I’m sorry, I’m sorry, there’s so much that I’m sorry for. Everything is moving too fast and I feel so sick with wanting you. I feel so sick of writing you. I need you alive and not just in my selfish words, and not just in my fading memories. Somewhere out there is a day which you remembered, and which I didn’t, and which I’ll never get back because we were the only people in the universe to ever know about it. So now just me, and if not me, then not you either. You’re dead. It’s a new tragedy every time. You’re dead and so are the yours-not-mine memories and so are any of the things which I might ever have been able to say to you.

I wouldn’t have ever needed to say these things. That’s the point. You were alive. I can try and justify the fact that I never wrote about you in life with something like that’s the point you were alive I never need to — but I owed it to you to try at least. I just never tried. This doesn’t read very well so maybe I’ve done it, maybe I’m so fucked with attention-deficit in this one single untenable moment that I’m beyond the kind of coherency which I hate hate hate hate hate, but untenable and coherency in the same sentence means that probably that isn’t true. I just miss you. I just will always owe you. I’m not enough to bring you back to life and I don’t know how to stop bringing that up.

Selfish words. Selfish grief. I want you back; I want my grief absolved. I never wrote about you. I can’t stop writing about you. I left you in that town to die and it becomes more my fault every time I bring you up.

I keep bringing you up.