Goodbye Steve
© Laura Craig Mason 2002


Depression has its spokes model;
suicide it's stereotype.
We think all the pretty and lonely girls suffer,
and all sad boys depart.
I've read the novels
and seen the after school specials;
I looked for the warning signs in friends;
I sent myself to therapy.
Safe in our assumptions
we forgot the older tragedies
the lives spiraling 
too far too reach
and
the grim realities
of loss through this bell curved life.

I still can see his russet hair
and white sweater
leaning out of the bedroom window
yelling at my cousins 
demanding that they
stop picking on me.

Always detached
with glass in hand
His moustache was a 70s standby.
He gave me a punk rock CD;
he was headed back to jail
I never got to speak to him as an adult;
I never got to say my goodbye.

Depression has it's spokes model;
suicide it's stereotype
We think all the pretty and lonely girls suffer
and all sad boys depart.
I've read the novels
and seen the after school specials;
I looked for the warning signs in friends;
I sent myself to therapy.
Safe in our assumptions
we forget the older tragedies
the lives spiraling out of control
and
the grim realities
of loss through this bell curved life.

Live fast; die young
leave a mourn-able corpse should you OD
out there, some where in Vegas.
Your family might not retrieve you;
they might even claim to have moved on,
although sallow faces
and empty eyes know differently.
If you live or die outside the models
of what the media perpetuates
you won't ever be the sad story,
only an inevitable conclusion
leaving fragments of yourself
the tear apart bystanders 
who thought to question
the shiny teeth of models
and the after school specials
with their happy endings.