We capitalize on our misery, the dividends of depression are something we transcribe to image, lay to paper, bleed and sweat into our art.
We do it to be away from it, to trap it, our own secret talisman in the way we shape it. Poetry and prose for myself, stories and art for my pal Wade.
Others keep it in, and their lives often become like my poems, mangled and twisted.
I bear the still bleeding wounds of death and loss and I express. To hold it in is misery. Trapping the beast within, for whatever reason, is too much to attempt.
I am fragments of yesterday. Nostalgia and imagery are sometimes the only things that drive me to another day. My name is the same, but I am another person. I died when he died.
Be the one to open a door and feel the cold rush of air, flip the light switch and see a lie stretched across a metal slab, see the bits of seaweed and debris hanging here and there, like some bad B-movie representation of a drowned man.
Be the one to "identify" the body of your best friend and hold in the scream that you want to wake you from the dream of life. Yes, I died that day, the moment I could see his eyes through half slits. Didn't they close them? In the movies they make a big show of closing a corpse's eyes, but the cops just asked me if it was him. I nodded my head. If I had said anything it would've been "No." I would've screamed it to make them know, to make Gerard rise from the dead. So I was silent.
I wanted to be with Gerard that night. I wanted to lay on that same cold slab and whisper to him. Tell him to come back to me. I was widowed. All the things we had seen and planned together were shoveled into his grave with him. He just died and that was it. I died with him.
 

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