her mother called her
a textbook virgo,
levelheaded, organized,
practical

and every spare moment she had
was spent writing

most of it was hopeful...
possibilities outlined neatly
on elite paper stock -
serious poems to be
submitted to editors,
poems to celebrate
special occasions,
outlines of plots
for short stories
she planned to write

her personal writings
were deeper, sadder

she wrote reams in a daily
journal about troubled
relationships, tiffs with
her husband and kids, her
competitive sister, each
comment meticulously penned
in an elegant flowing manner

but that final note she left
was the shocker,
written in a freakishly
jumpy, shaky hand,
overly loopy, jagged,
a note on cheesy motel
stationery, filled with longing,
with despair,
words spewing out of her pen,
out of control words
scrawled far from home,
the solitary writer engaged
in an emotional seizure,
facing her phantoms alone
and losing

you liked
red nail polish &
the smell of gasoline;
the molecular structure
of oxygen.

you liked orchestras,
dinner candles in empty bottles,
the sound of moving trains, you

stole
cheap ballpoint pens
  & you father’s new cigars.

you played philip glass on the piano,
put too much ice in your whiskey,
only ever cried in the shower.

you only owned one DVD.

you used newspapers
to light fires in flower pots but
never read them —
you got the news from the radio
in the car, when stuck
in traffic.     you ran red lights,
balanced on the edge
of the universe as if
life
was a tightrope
or some nihilistic punchline.

you had the courage of stars
and wildfire eyes — I tried
to find myself
outside of you.

you called me ‘baby’ and burnt
my lungs
with your perpetual cigarettes

&

I cannot
forget
you.