Buddy Wakefield, excerpt from “Harmony Enemy”, A Choir of Honest Killers
[ text ID: “I’m not scared to die, I just don’t want it to hurt. / I bet the biggest misconception about death is that we won’t care anymore. / I will never not love you. / Hiding the absence of your love is a mathematical impossibility. / You were the year I wished my life on other people. / Magnets are incapable of lying. / Darkness is redundant. I wanted us to be the truth. / I meant to do it correctly. / In loving gain of our memory. And mercy. / Do not flake on the blessing. / There is every such thing. We were every such thing. / I may have been grossly underprepared to receive love. / Was it even in this lifetime that we knew each other? / Tonight, I painted my apartment and remembered every life I’ve ever lived, including the one where you read this. / Was I really too sensitive, or were you just too unconscious? / Maybe we work our way to the middle. / Maybe we work our way into what we are. / Why don’t you want to know what we are? / I’ll cut your costume loose. Cut you right out of it. / When something is absent, it is absolutely not in your way. Get in my way. / Come remind me what we are together. Do it soon. / Soon we will have to say what we have to say / to each other’s faces. / Mine is I love you. Mine is Have mercy. / I just wanted to throw something as hard as I could. / I wasn’t paying attention to what it would do when it landed.” ]
