legends | spacejunk

i plan on preforming this piece at a poetry reading very soon, but i don't like it yet. i think it has potential, but i don't know what to change. any criticism is welcome. (:

your obituary remains unwritten because i still don't have enough faith in this curse of a mentality to believe that you killed yourself in the first place. you are -- were -- so much more than beautiful. i told you that i always thought that stars looked handsomest when cars passed because the lights reflected their sparkle perfectly. this poem remains untold because i don't have enough faith in this curse of a talent to believe that i could steal a star's beauty straight out of the sky with these words; no one listens to pretty girls, anyway. but oh my god, those stars were so much more than beautiful. i don't know what it was about those stars in particular, but i swear, every single one reminded me of you. maybe it was because of how everyone noticed how alluring they were only when they were dying, only when everyone could see "what they were really made of." maybe it was how our cameras couldn't focus on them long enough to capture the wholeness of their magnificence. i don't know what it was about you, always smelling like burnt wood and beauty, but i could find poems in your fingertips. i still don't know how to write your forever after. i've been in love with you since the day before i learned your name. i learned your name 16 1/2 days before we formally met; it wasn't on purpose. i found it hiding in between the drops of rain falling on the playground. your father had been searching for it in the sandbox. ever since you were little, you had always wanted to be an escape artist; maybe that's why your dad said that loosing you felt like drowning. upside down. you always had room breathe between the raindrops, but he didn't know that. hell, he didn't even know to look for you instead of your name, 16 1/2 days before we met. did you know that the sharpness of his sobbing when he saw your mangled body could cut souls like shards of glass? your last words to me were, "when i die, turn me into a metaphor." you were never supposed to turn into, "learning experience," but you know i was always too busy looking at you to pay attention in history class. what kind of cautionary tale do you think this is? why would you expect death to be fair to you when life never was? in ninth grade, you ripped flowers from their homes for me. i was selfish enough to refuse them because that was the closest i had gotten to gentrification by white boy. i told you that we shouldn't kill things that we think are beautiful, but now that i'm writing this unwritten poem of an obituary, i believe that maybe you confused your reflection for a star; you saw beauty all around you, but never thought to look in the mirror. maybe you allowed that car to shatter 27 bones in your body because you knew that i thought stars always looked handsomest when lit by a car's brights. now that i'm getting around to this unwritten obituary, the only thing i can think of is the last words from your lips. i should have known something was wrong when you told me that you have always been scared to death of living. the news of your suicide carved itself into my bones; it chiselled away at my soul like an arizona landscape: beautiful, until you notice that everything is just shades of the same colour. phoenix can't rise without wings. home is where the heart is, but my heart is stuck in this obituary of a poem, so don't be surprised if i start living in my notebook. come time to your funeral, i filler a vase with faux flowers and sand. i placed it in between the rain drops on your shiny black casket, next to the certificate of the star i named after you. the star i named, "escape artist". i still don't know how to write your forever after.