you felt like a still life.
i laid next to you and held your hand
and tunnel visioned on your IV
while everyone sat around you in a circle
coloring you in without looking up from their paper
convinced they can capture the color of your lips
as if they exist in a way that isnt
completely unique to you.
scratching their pencils in an echo
that stretched across the grand-*******-canyon.
(i'm no artist
but i traced a smiley face into your palm)
i've watched your eyes fall over your pale skin
cursing your own body for making you into
a stone cut marble statue
instead of a vibrant painting on the wall.
(this poem does your portrait no justice)
if i could drown myself in a thesaurus
i would come up with words that are
synonymous to the hole you are leaving in my chest,
you felt like a still life.
you reached out and ghosted your hand over river water
you reached out and pulled budding flowers from trees
you reached out and broke pencils and snapped necks
you reached out for please do not touch signs
(you reached out and your arms fell short of distance.)
and i refuse to believe your legacy will stay in this artwork,
that your vibrant light will be caged in the chest of those who know you,
that your masterpiece will be shoveled into the storage rooms,
and pushed around and cracked at the edges,
that eventually i will forget how your voice sounds
and how you reach out and touch right through me
(and how you clung to your body and forgave it for betraying you.)
i can only imagine
that you will leave me
(with a grief that is waiting in a sickly anticipation
crawling up my legs and surrounding me like ivy)
i dont know anything about grieving
but it sounds so heavy, like a cement weight subject
a sixteen-year-old isnt supposed to teach.
(with deafening echos of people who scribble over your eyelids)
(with a calling into the earth like there are stones in my stomach and i make a home in the bottom of a riverbed)
and don't understand what it means
to watch art be nothing more than art
when your words become quotes
and your life becomes dates
and your eyes become a memorial
(i will live with you
trapped in the holes)
covering the parts of me i left at your bedside
drenched in the ironic taste of brushstrokes and immortality
you still feel like a still life
you are your own genre
you give art a new definition
(and i will spend the rest of my time
getting your details right)