What a Life

It’s been twenty-five years since you’ve stood with your friends singing Hallelujah on a stage, feeling the vibration of a hundred voices lifting from the platform to the sky. It’s been twenty years since you listened to that same song on the way to your friend’s funeral. He’d shot himself to death at work. What a life. Now you can’t listen to that song without crying and you will always wonder how you couldn’t have seen it coming, and why no one ever usually sees it coming. There should be a prescription everyone gets at birth, an RX for love that will sustain us. Instead we’re smacked and shot and probed while we’re cold and naked and screaming. What a life. Ten years ago you thought things were on the up and up and could only get better, but you were wrong. The daily grind to earn enough to survive is beginning to wear you down. You think more often whether your friend felt the cold metal of the gun against his temple or in his mouth, or if he spared himself that sensation. Death, kissing his lips, cold and sweet as ice cream. What a life.