I killed myself today.
It was too much.
The debt,
The expectations,
The hippies,
The stonefaced
Unsympathetic Vietnam vets asking me if I was a *****.
To tell you the truth, Gus,
You've got to be pretty **** ******* to slit that throat,
To pull that trigger,
To hang that corpse from a rafter high.
But I did it classy.
Yeah.
I died like a Roman who had plotted against great Caesar.
I went home,
Slipped into the tub wearing a suit I pieced together from Uptown Thrift.
As the scorching water flowed,
I sipped wine and read the bible.
King James Version only, mind you.
As the water approached my neck I shut it off.
I laughed at the hypocrisy:
A suicide scene with a bible strewn about.
I muttered,
Then took the knife and opened up my veins.
I bled out.
My thoughts drifted to depressing things:
My 2 year old brother working a night shift at Walmart holding back his tears while being yelled at by a balding middle aged man who never did anything with his life,
A dog corpse ***** and mutilated by some *******,
A banker smoking a cigarette and laughing in an infant's face,
And the world turning on.
As it always does.
As it always will.

Somewhere a clock is ticking
And your brother has passed.
His last words were your name.
He was afraid and in the dark
So he pulled the covers over his head,
Just to get away.

Somewhere a clock is ticking
And your father is gone.
He fought demons and diseases.
He lived in a hellhole for years
While you sought a bottle
Just to get away.

Somewhere a clock is ticking
But you'll never see them again.
It ticks off the years
And the grey in your hair,
It tells you to give in
Just to get away.

They speak loudly and in generalities.
In truth, had they been born 10,000 years earlier,
Neither one would have given the other fire.
A forehead like a Neanderthal's
And a spine full of steel walk into a bar.
"I'll have a Guinness and a mop," sayeth the spine.

Insignificant dust
Swept under a cosmic carpet.
From pharaohs
To the night stockers at Wal-Mart,
Beg the questions asked countless times before.
I tell myself it doesn't matter
Because I'm on the up and up.
I won't be in this place forever
So what's the harm in taking it easy?
Some alternative country song plays on the air;
Singing about nostalgia and the west.
They don't have those things in China.
And here I thought I'd get to start over
In an afterlife with my family.
When I see their lifeless eyes,
I can tell no one thinks beyond themselves.

Of all the things I ever did
And on all the things I held so dear,
Ever all I wanted to accomplish,
To pen a rhyme an Irishman held near.

A song to sing to begin the spring
Or a lament to raise a pint to.
Like rebels before who held the door
So that we could march right through.

And many will say I am not in that way,
Born on Erin's emerald isle.
But my heart's as green as e'er been seen
And my heritage I cling to all the while.

Life thus far has been but naught;
Rife with torment, tears, and fraught.
And ever on my soul does step
Around the bend and gently swept
To a greener plain both bright and fair,
No more to tread a boggy chare.
To familiars close and kins away,
To God's green Heaven is where I stray.

I'd kick a can as far as I could,
But I'm as empty as the thing and it does no good.

I'd smash the glass after I finished my beer,
But the shards would scatter, like my heart, I fear.

And who would clean up the mess?

I smile at the pretty girls and introduce myself,
But they see my belly and grey, so I go back on the shelf.

There is a girl; Scots-German and holy,
But my brother pursues her and I am not worthy.

And who would clean up the mess?

I'd drink up the ocean and die belly up,
But the sea would refill from when I erupt.

I've scaled my last mountain and caressed my last *****,
But, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I crossed all my chasms.

Got to give up that ghost.