Screw lengthy suicide notes written on parchment paper
with ink quills and impeccable cursive.
My father drove me all the way to San Francisco
to read me his while leaning against the guardrail
of the Golden Gate Bridge: it was only six words,
scrawled in Bic pen on the back of a bar napkin.
My own existence wounds me deeply.
All the therapists on this half of the globe
don’t have enough couches to hold my sadness.
Their kleenex boxes and So how does that make you feel?’s
will never be enough.
After years of simultaneously trying to leave and disappear,
I learned that going and gone are not synonyms.
They were simply defense mechanisms, the kind
all psychology textbooks wax poetic about:
ways of trying to change things
that cannot be helped.