they asked me to chip in for the headstone. i told them to fuck themselves.

i made sure the funeral was pithy and stark. i drew x’s on your sleeping eyelids with black ink.

i asked them to serve your limbs at the reception, but they refused.

[i still dig you up every november to take progressive photographs of your ugly decay.]

listen, do you remember when we tripped on our shoelaces and tumbled from high stone spires, trying to waltz to cobblestone musicians that could not quite reach us? was that spain? singapore?

and do you remember years and years ago when we ran mad, painted everything tangerine, sluiced wet rainbows on storefronts?

maybe we spent a day in bed naming each of your lovely ribs after greek deities. maybe meilichios was the one they stole off to the laboratory to create woman.

maybe it doesn’t matter anymore.

can you recall?

can you call?

this dial-tone cicada in my ear, it’s...

well, what he taught me, your honor, was that the color grey is a myth.

no, your honor, i did not push him. well, your honor, my fingerprints are on the gun, i suppose, because we took it for a flippant spin before he decided to do it without me.

what’s it like? sparkling white hospital tile and endless, suffocating boredom? [i hope.]

i went to sleep with your suicide note beneath my pillow and dreamed that i would someday take the place of your mother, calling up that your supper is getting cold and

i keep waiting to hear that creaking door, for you to come back in from the cold with crutches and cigarettes, and

i can’t help but wonder, if i had bought you that quill pen would you have drawn stitches on your wrists after opening them? would you have whisked it beneath your nose and sneezed up those sleeping pills? would you have flown, icarus, on its downy crimson instead of crashing twelve storeys to the pavement?

you know i hate you for this, don't you? i do. but meet me on the terrace at six for a drink and i’ll consider forgiving you.

the day you died I dragged my black lungs all the way to the peak of that mount olympus, and while looking up at the big, big moon , i tapped out telegrams to space

did you get them?