The days you're gone I think about gravity, about tectonic plates,
about fog so thick you can't see your own hands even when you're holding them right in front of your eyes.
I think about you, not just unable but also unwilling to consume me whole.
I think about my mother, cigarette smoke and lonely days, cuddles with children too big to still be in bed with her.
I think about deserted islands, car crashes and how sometimes life crashes down around you like the remnants of a 747.
I think about echoes, about shaking hands and trembling voices
and I think about her, singing daughter's still until the ocean swallowed her whole.

she was there the first time I tried hanging myself
from the ceiling fan in the comfort of my own room,
looking down at the red faced mess that wept on
the floor, daddy's leather belt tied around his neck,
a choking silence, a quiet wheezing, frustrating tears,
anger at another failure, head pounding, head screaming:
"You're not good enough! You're not good enough...!"
over and over again like a scratched record, needle on,
a ghostly hand, tattooed poems from pale shoulder to pale fingers,
reaching out at a limp hand, a gentle squeeze by winter's touch,
a crooked toothed understanding smile, paper eyes into tv static eyes,
rivers cascading down a rocky pimpled face, this was a surrender,
she knew, she'd so long ago surrendered herself, raised a white flag
on her own fortress of solitude, the life cooked out in a gas oven,
I was always a sinner though in no gods I've believed, and hell
I don't fear because hell is manmade, hell is here, hell is smirks,
hell is being mocked, hell is disappointing grades, hell is ripping the hairs
from my head in an attempt to replace pain, hell is grand, I felt it, she felt it,
and there is nothing after death and nothing is better than this nothingness,
seconds away from experiencing the soothing blandness of infinite zero
the belt collapsed on my weight and here I was and here she was, peering,
and though becoming a corpse didn't worry me, the following days did,
she comprehended, but for whatever reason she comforted me,
until dissipating back into her own tiny place on the bookshelf,
to live her lifelessness between the leafs of a book, leaving the broken me
to see another night, another sunrise, hiding the belt in father's dresser.