Splayed in my miserable bed, I try vainly to hum you back to life.
An amber moon descends the stairs now, echoing that desperate night
Upon cracked concrete where your crooked spin finally came to rest.
Your silent suffering sufficed—All old wounds healed at last.
And so I take it upon myself to dig through what you left behind.
Pouring over the tablature of your life, I listen to the syntax
Of your melancholic moods. An addict: Jim Beam, amphetamine,
A woman’s tender gaze. You needed others in a way only we know.
In you I found a self-same coward drawn to death like a lazy eye erring,
Another child tired of love’s deadpan landscape, whispering songs as prayers.
Plucking the lyrics from your breast, you became the tragic chord barred upon my life.
Your voice was soft and something inside of it softer, ebbing with the cadence
Of a curtain in spring’s petaling wind. Eternally absent, you’ll never be here to witness
How the holy breath of the world falls and rises, missing you. I recall how your voice crumbled As you spoke to me and said that If I’m alone, it must be me who wants to be apart.
Then you took that fatal descent two years before I was born and everything fell apart since.
Elliott, we share the same broken pieces but I can’t fit them back into you. I’m stuck
As me, watching this month receding and the leaves with it. While you, ashes on a mantle
Or somewhere delicate and thoughtful, lie in wait until the chasmic hand of Time swallows
Me with it, and we reune in the same oblivion. When you sang to me in the depth of my lanky,
Unembraced youth, we were mired in one frustrated darkness. Now twilight rises
As your record repeats. I live on to finish the song that faltered in your inflamed mind
When you slammed that final door—but the tune dissolved to an electric hum then, droning
As you laid to behold the lone light bulb burning out while your blood floods Los Angeles.
Behind the Writing
“Inspired by the life and music of Elliott Smith.”
Writer To Writer Literary Journal 