People romanticise about committing suicide
and of course
that beloved attempt,
but in reality, what is so romantic
about waking up three days after
an unsuccessful pill binge,
vomit in hair and caked dry on clothes,
crusting down chin and neck
mixed with blood and bile,
insides of a stomach next to your head.
The taste in your mouth,
of cotton wool dried into balls of pustular growths
and that inability to coordinate limbs
to either avoid twitching
or promote feeling and the slightest sense of movement.

Then after lying in your own filth
for god knows how long
having to look the people in the eye around you,
those people that left you there
knowing that it was just another attempt,
but not a real endeavour this time
and not the next either.

How do you feel when you start the clean up,
wiping your crusted refuse from the floor,
stains on the ground, just like those implanted in mind,
people avoiding contact with eyes darkened
from self abuse, eyes white colouring urine yellow
from excess bile due to a failing liver.

It’ll be seven years before
you’ve completely repaired that damage;
you’ll never get back those brain cells
you joyfully destroyed, it’s your life.

Or how about the scenario of beauty
slashing wrists with a mercifully sharp razor blade,
you avoid the dulled bluntness of your kitchen knife
because by the time you got it to pierce your skin
it would have done the damage
and there wouldn’t be any turning back,
any sweet fainting in knowledge of being found,
blood billowing so gently in pools about you,
like some kind of Aphrodite in a mass of blood-red roses.

Your dreams are obscene.

Then you can parade bandaged arms
like some kind of battle trophy
but those scars are going to be there
for the younger generations to always see,
they’ll be there to tell the tale
that perhaps you might want to forget in years
when you’ll start to wear long jumpers
in mid-summer heat,
tightly cuffed to never show forgotten shame.
But for the present, what isn’t more divine
then yearning for death in pretence
when those behind you can pick up the pieces
and bind them together, damage their lives
with slivers of your flesh falling from the sky.

And you’ll say that there’s nothing here to live for,
the world is polluted with rubbish and disease,
that living is for the greed-ridden and war-obsessed gluttons
and you’ve better things to do with your time.
Or that no-one loves you, no-one cares
and no-one knows who you are. Who are you?
But who does care about you
if you really don’t have anything better to do with your time
than commiserate with yourself about your lack of reception
from a world that you refuse to offer yourself to,
why should anyone give a damn about you
if you’ve turned your back on everyone long ago
and repudiate a seconds thought
on perhaps what you could offer this world in decline,
slow down the destruction where
you are the catalyst and destroyer.

But, well, why not,
there’s a gun in the back room,
a bullet in the front,
you’ve had enough education
from blindly watching the television screen
enjoying mass murder and violence,
do yourself in properly.
Or there’s an isolated noose
in an abandoned house,
I could write your name on it if you like
so people won’t forget it’s yours for use
and later when your decaying body
starts to smell and the neighbours
complain to the police department
they’ll know your identity
so you won’t be forgotten
and so in your death
you can become that romanticised figure
who was so lonely
they killed themselves on a labelled noose
and no-one could forget the regret
they’ll feel about losing a stranger
they’d never have known anyway,
because you’re so obsessed with your own self.