When my mother calls me, I don’t answer When my brother and his girlfriend sit at the dinner table They wonder where I am Like a book never finished They’ll turn the page and find a cover The final word’s been written and this story is over The music stops And curled snake strings lay broken At my cracked asphalt feet When my father finally cries after 60 years It’s onto blank paper and cigarette ash fingers My sweet little Onica, they’ll send me your flowers When the police come to take my body away They don’t ask about my fake name They don’t write “Ronnie” on their records They don’t want to know how cold a hostel bed can be And don’t care that I could feel my teeth rotting When the coroner checks his clipboard I’m no one’s first friend When they cut my ribcage open The stories I tell all have heart attack endings My unshaved legs go nowhere and my body stays raped White cloth over black eyes Back in the dark she goes I’m number one hundred billion Dead-eyed dead girl Nothing to see here Keep moving right to the next great soul taken too soon When I arrive at the place between awake and asleep And I stand at the mouth of the Endless River God asks me, “do you understand now?” And I tell Her I’m trying. But my lover still cries as he plays my voicemail into the dark And my mother’s still waiting on that “I’m safe” call “Oh, July child,” says She, “How broken is the heart with no love for itself.” When I weigh myself right down into the earth By the grace of angel dust go I into the night But I won’t go forgotten I can’t die unnamed The flipped card song of my burnt tongue sings temperance And I have not learned it here When my Bic flicker flame heart hangs onto life I feel his hand against my breast And feel mine against his face “Why? Why now must it be me? Is that just the way things have to be And I control the Reaper like I control the sea?” “Oh July child,” says She, “Here, you’re a traveler And you wandered too far from home I’m the doorman at the gates, my love But you were the one who entered.” But Her words are drowning under miles of black water An hour after I passed out I suddenly wake up alone My mother calls me And here, I answer Here my unshaved legs wrap around the one I love most And here, I did not die in vain Here there’s still shopping trips to make at 11PM Here there’s blankets to fold incorrectly Here we can cook dinner together Hot oil flicking out of the pan My grandmother bought me for Christmas Here I can touch myself And I don’t feel his hands anymore Here, whole is the heart that loves itself The music plays on The pen moves forward And oh, how beautiful it is To die
Ronnie Toone 