Remembering A Best Friend Who Committed Suicide Poem by Suchaita Tenneti

The cough syrup sky sickens me—
Eliot’s patient etherized;
its purple pink betrays traces of void
promises rain to conceal my pain
oblivious………..that my tears are lung frozen.
The trees—silent spectators to the impending storm:
their stance antagonizes me
Awake silent denizens! Warn the ignorant pedestrians, the dozing strays!
Calmness alas is only a prelude!

Was the dawn such when you died?

Reminisces now excruciating:
secret chuckles beneath palm covered lips
bakery sneaks for forbidden treats
parent complaints, classmates’ tainted lives: telephones bore witness
wooing crushes, discovering love ultimately in each other—unashamed lovers we were…

Now

Our love’s testimony claustrophobic in slambooks and letters
Photographic is our intimacy…

Reduced to ashes, I have no tomb to visit,
No epitaph to immortalize,
No scope for immortality in my prosaic imagination…
The hum of childhood whispers
turn into cacophonies of thwarted possibilities;
You shielded me from mean murmurs, cruel snickers
Gave me the strength to shrug off the lewd;
Now naked to the world
My singularity chokes me, suffocates me…

Even more

My wretched inadequacy haunts, worse…nags
Merits my confounded delirium
In pain you solaced
And I relented
Condemned be me! No assuagement for my throes of guilt!

Milton reconciled, forgave the nymphs, inhospitable fate—
I blame none but myself, I cannot concede
I will not accept…

Your note—your last fragment for us earthly sufferers—
Was it more heartful that the bands and epistles of our love?
I received no mention in it;
Was that hate? My punishment for failure? Your unarticulated cry of being forsaken
By one that shared the other half of your heart?

Or did you ache as much as I
Did the pangs of anguish rip your conscience as mine
Did you not mention me for your fingers trembled, faltered?
(I know mine would)
Writer’s cramps testify friendship’s paralysis
The futility of words
The inability to confide
Except through the act.
But I endured……soul sister

in pools of perspiration
eyes ravaged by emotions’ curse, fretted figure
here I lie
slumbering sickness in sorrow.