I Wrote an Essay on Suicide (in Tenth Grade)

 

That blue guitar I had

when I was young

is gone now,

frets and strings

pulled back to another time.

 

I remember the burning

on my fingertips,

the busyness of learning

to put the tune all together,

 

and a yearning

to scale

from basement

to window

to…

 

I don’t know,

Other.

 

I wanted to send a message

from hidden hours

I’d spent writing and sketching

figures of love and loneliness

draped across my waterbed.

 

Oceans have passed

since then

and the message

remains much the same.

 

Hello. I am.  And so are you. I see you,

lily among the cranberries

in a burning coffin.

Jump, but into a place

where snow and rain are soft.

 

The tune plays softly still,

lighting matches for hope’s candle.

 

Grasp it with me, together.

We’ll need the light,

and we’ve got many miles to go

before we sleep.

 

 

© 2024 Jennifer Wagner

 

Shay’s Word Garden Word List

 

The close is a twist on the close of Robert Frost’s poem.  Yes, I had a waterbed and a blue guitar in the 80’s. 

 

After Suicide

He still goes over to his house,
sits in his room,
says a lifetime of goodbyes to ashes
--what's left
when the oxygen of hope thins,
choked out by the rasping fire-of-lies
believed at just-turned twenty.


Remembering often in stories,
as the living do
of the dead--
he laughs,
cries,
swears,
breaks, bitterly.


And when reads to me what he writes,
how it is to lose a brother,
memorializing what was,
he ends it
the only way he can.


You don’t know what you’ve done to me.



© 2015 Jennifer Wagner


At the end of August my son's best friend since he was 11 years old committed suicide at the age of 20. A crater-sized hole has been created, and though I know it is a pain that will remain for the rest of his life, I pray for it to lessen for him and for all those who loved Baily. He is greatly missed.