It’s the night that does the trick,
The tones, the heaviness that tells me
There is no sun.
Your leather bag on my legs,
On my skin, on me, my feet
Dangling around, I hold it
As if it were you, as if, as if,
And I bury myself in the flesh of my pain,
Death in my arms, a goodbye object,
And you disappeared, leather bag on my skin,
I sit there and wail and I really want to scream,
But it’s too late, I have neighbours, I am in pain,
Yes, it is too late, you could say that, skin on skin,
Leather bag on my legs, your broken feet,
Hit the ground, broke you, broken you,
Beautiful boy, and I sit there as it were yesterday,
I sit here and remember what I cannot forget,
What travels through my skull,
Awakening the loss, shooting images through my system,
I am traumatised, I have lost, I hold that bag and think it
Is a piece of you, you, yourself, again in my arms, tangible,
I am obsessed, down the legs, down the drain,
Tears, on you, your dead skin, formaldehyde, not you,
And yet, keeping you, holding on, what is you,
What you are, where, I burn inside, all the things
You were looking forward to, all the things
That brought you joy, bring me pain, bring me love,
I am sitting there with the bag
You carried with you on that day (every day),
The bag that assisted you, the bag that walked with you,
The bag that you got for Christmas,
The bag that held your mints (I have a few left)
(A taste familiar to you, to me)
The bag that was so well ordered,
The bag that contained you and your work,
Meticulous, caring, organised, reliable,
The bag that replaced every single one of us
When you took your last steps, you held it,
It might have held you,
And I think it was a sunny day,
When you walked yourself to that bridge
That rips my heart out of my chest,
When you walked that bag towards the bridge,
The talisman of life and death,
Hasty steps, determined steps, a bag in our stead,
The object that haunts my flat, that I love,
That I will never let go and abandon,
It speaks your language, it spoke your language,
You wanted it for Christmas and you got it,
The bag that you lay down before the thick wall,
The thick stony balustrade of that suicide bridge
(Yes, I will call it that until you take care of your hurting men)
And left it there when you climbed and jumped,
As if it were routine, as if you had done it a million times,
A wordless gesture, goodbye, and the bag lay there,
Without you, and you were no more,
Who saw what, who walked past it, where were you,
Were you ever, at all, a lonely bag sitting against a wall,
On a sidewalk, in the morning, containing your story,
Contaminated, the lonely object telling your story
If one cared to stop and look, you left it there,
You left us here, someone picked it up
And shoved it in our faces
And we knew what happened here.
Croque-Melpomene 