Suicide; society tells me it’s a ***** word

Blackens your tongue and brands you an

Outsider to your beloved community;

Tarnishes your dazzling reputation and

Takes a beautiful, cherished, short-lived, soul.

But why did society not raise me like the

Painstakingly adored roses amongst

Its garden of thorns; why can’t I be

That happy girl. Why have I been

Doused in fertiliser, a wretched ****

Amongst a garden of beauty, growing

Faster than lightning, roots of gnarly

Agony and shoots of grey, blurred hatred for

Every atom of my being- screams for the ****

Killer to embrace me by the neck, apply a-

Seductive dose of love-dripping pressure

And set this crow free; unchain my bruised wings

And I promise I will leave you be, I will never

Bring misery or misfortune again.

But suicide; is a ***** word, a cheek

Burning, soul smouldering, darkening

Shadow on the pretty plastic cases over our,

Mechanical hearts. Not for the great pain of

Losing a barely, blossomed flower- took one

Heavy dose of white-pain sunlight and

Wilted away into the black, bottomless soil.

Not for the gaping loss of a singular

Fertile crop in an endless year of draught and

Famine. Suicide, is not a tear-wrenching,

Palm-sweating word for the, heavy and huge hole

It leaves in society’s newly plastered walls-

But it is an unspeakable word for the pure

Shame. The surly shadow of unspeakable

Shame that it leaves like a, stain of red wine

On the pretty, sensible woman’s white blouse

Like a ****** tattoo on the arm of an infant.

We do not grieve their death. We grieve our pride,

Our bruised and bleeding pride at not preventing

The stench of failure as a race of people, in the death

Of one melancholy drowned person, we practically

Placed the boulders in their pockets and said drown.

And I am holding my breath; tight roping this

Misery that smothers me at sunrise, see I am

Permitted a feigned slumber of peace in the dead

Hours of night yet I awake to the,

Asphyxiation of pain, eyes bulging in terror of

What awaits me when I run out of time, oxygen fast-

Fading and the orange, pink of dawn lights a

Fire in the honey pools of my eyes- small, mocking fires

That sneer at my desperation to cease, at my plea for peace-

Tight, burning stabs that tingle in my throat and

I’m running low on air, on time, almost there-

Deliria, ecstasy, glee dripping from my limbs

And- the noose I fabricated in my non-

Functioning, disabled mind slips away, faster

Than I can catch it and refasten, and I am, cold

In my bedsheets once more. Welcomed again,

To the now bellowing daylight of, depression

Another flightless, fruitless day of carefully,

Hand-stitched smiles and sinfully pre-tuned

Laughter. The world tells me to stand on the

Pinnacle of misery with one broken leg and

If I dare fall, I am a branded shame on the surface

Of the earth, I am the centre of all failure in the

Universe so I, valiantly ride into no-mans-land,

A knight in shining armour except, I have no steel

And no bronze to, protect my heart from the cannon fire

Of pain, I have no shield to shelter me from the

Poison gas of self-hatred. But I am perfectly okay being

Defenceless in the brazen gunfire; I am still breathing,

The titanium arrows of misery protruding neatly from

My mangled limbs and my broken heart.

And that word, sombre and dark as ever

Flashes once in my head and I swat it away with

Deep-rooted disgust, and a dire hunger for such a desire.

Suicide;

Society tells me it’s a ***** word.