Suicide Poets Poem by Indigo Hawkins

Is not this the true romantic feeling: not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you? ~ Thomas Wolfe

I’m sick of the tormented psyche. All the slashes
in her dark eyes, violence of the mind bleeding out
like a miscarriage, a kick to the womb, with
the fetus drowning in amniotic fluid, floating
in a vacuum. They make murder beautiful,
seductive as the mysterious yew tree and its
fatalistic bark. Espousing garish German, we’ll
all be fascists like our fathers, incestuous
ergot enthusiasts, McCarthy acolytes:
champions of persecution, if you’ll permit me
my oppression, maybe I’ll inject a sliver
of pain inside your pleasure. Wouldn’t that
be excruciatingly profound? There must
be a reason. Give me a reason, give me
a needle, and I will find one on my own.

I can visualize Van Gogh, one-eared, textured,
tense. Isolated in a field of tulips, half of sound
swallowed by his scarred skin, where bruises bloom
like flowers, luscious ochre unfurling from deep prussian
blue. Then a void voice, like tinnitus, ringing:
“I had the shotgun against my head, my finger
on the trigger. My mother walked in.”
The woman who inhaled noxious gasoline
to light herself on fire, tired of anticipating
her funeral pyre, and that girl, the one pregnant
with potential, who stabbed herself
to escape the rape of her lungs. She smiles
a smile so full it trembles, heavy
with sunlight, swaying
like tulips, a shade too bright for breath.