Work Text:
1.
They tell me not to write to ghosts.
But you were always more phantom than boy, weren’t you?
That laugh—a flare in the forest. The flicker of something too alive to last.
I write because I am afraid I will forget the shape of your voice.
And if I forget, did you exist?
And if you didn’t exist, then what am I grieving?
And if I’m not grieving, then why does the moon look like your mouth every night?
Why does the wind ask for your forgiveness in my voice?
2.
You made the world louder.
Now it hums. A funeral dirge behind wallpaper.
My roommate is quiet again. So am I.
A grave can be a dormitory too.
They changed the sheets after you left.
But your smell still lives in the radiator.
And the walls still flinch when I whisper your name.
I tried to scrub your ghost out of the air with lemon cleaner.
But the scent of you haunts in citrus, too.
3.
I keep seeing your death in reverse.
The gun uncocking.
Your lungs filling again.
The window slamming shut.
The father unshouting.
The playbill pressed into your hand.
You—smiling.
You—alive.
You—saying,
“It was just a bad dream.”
4.
But it wasn’t.
And I keep waking up inside it.
5.
There’s a boy in class who taps his pencil like you did.
And every time I look up, I expect a wink.
But it’s not you.
It never is.
It never will be.
6.
I walked to the theater building last week.
It smelled like you.
Stage dust and longing.
I almost opened the costume closet.
Almost.
I don’t know what I expected—
You?
A ghost in velvet?
Or just the air, stubbornly not your breath?
7.
Do you remember when you touched my shoulder?
You said, “Speak, Todd. Your voice matters.”
I never told you—
I wanted to grab your hand and break under it,
like a dam, like a sky, like silence
finally rupturing into something holy.
I never told you that you saved me.
And then you didn’t.
You threw me the rope, and then hung yourself with it.
You taught me to breathe, and then choked the sky.
You held me open and then shut the world.
Why do you always leave me with your half of the story?
13.
I dream in winters now.
It is always snowing and your hands are bare.
You press them to the glass and whisper,
“Come out.”
I don’t.
Because this time, I know where you’re going.
And I cannot follow again.
Not when I know how your footsteps end—
Abrupt.
Like a line cut from a play.
Like a poet who died mid-metaphor.
Like a boy who never got to be more than almost.
17.
When they found you—
I imagined your face
half-smile frozen like a question left on my desk.
Like: “Would you come with me?”
And I never answered.
And I never answered.
And I never—
God, Neil. Why did you leave the page blank?
Why did you leave me with the silence?
21.
I am a poet now.
Isn’t that funny?
You always said I was one.
I said, “No, I’m not.”
You said, “Then become one.”
You always wanted me to become.
But you—
You un-became.
You turned punctuation into a grave.
You put a period where there should have been ellipses.
You walked off stage before the second act.
The audience is still clapping.
They think it's intermission.
They don’t know you’re never coming back.
24.
I bought a red scarf.
I wear it under my uniform,
hidden like a wound.
Like a rebellion.
Like a kiss I never gave you.
27.
I sit where you used to sit in Keating’s class.
I mouth your lines in dead languages.
Et in Arcadia ego.
Even in paradise—death speaks.
Was I your Arcadia, Neil?
Were you mine?
Did we ever get a paradise, or just the ruin that came after?
I still have your copy of Leaves of Grass.
The spine is cracked on every page you loved.
I think I broke it the way your father broke you—
by demanding it stay closed.
29.
You lit fires in me.
Now I am all smoke.
And it stings.
And no one asks why I’m always coughing.
31.
I kissed your name once.
On the playbill.
Backstage.
Nobody saw.
I didn’t want them to.
It felt too raw. Like your lips might open again beneath mine
and say:
“Don’t cry, Todd.”
You always hated tears.
I give them to you anyway.
I drown you in them nightly.
I baptize your memory with salt.
Does that count as forgiveness?
39.
I write your name at the bottom of every poem.
Then I erase it.
Because I’m afraid someone will ask.
Because I want someone to ask.
Because no one ever does.
The paper remembers what the ink won’t say.
Your ghost lives in my backspace key.
You are the reason I can never end a poem without biting my lip bloody.
44.
They made me write a eulogy.
I almost threw up on the page.
I said:
“He was bright.”
“He was kind.”
“He was…”
(But what I meant was:)
He was the fire in my throat.
The dare in my bones.
The boy I would have kissed if the world were gentler
and the curtains closed slower.
And if love had been allowed to mean boy and boy
without becoming obituary.
47.
Sometimes I think about reincarnation.
Maybe you’re a hawk now.
Maybe a flame.
Maybe a boy somewhere else, unafraid.
Maybe a daffodil.
(I see them in spring, and every time I whisper:
Neil?)
50.
This is the secret I wear like skin:
I loved you.
I still do.
I think I always will.
No, I know I always will.
Is that enough?
Would it have been?
Was it too much?
Was I too quiet to save you?
59.
They say:
“He was troubled.”
“He was under pressure.”
“He wasn’t thinking straight.”
As if love is a bent wire in the brain.
As if I imagined the way you looked at me that night in the snow,
saying nothing,
letting our silence mean something.
I hate them for not seeing you.
I hate them for not seeing us.
I hate myself for pretending it was a phase.
I hate myself for surviving it.
62.
You would’ve made a terrible actor, you know.
Because you never learned how to lie.
That’s what killed you.
(That’s what I loved.)
You couldn’t wear someone else’s mask.
So you carved out your own face.
They asked you to be Hamlet.
You gave them Ophelia.
71.
Sometimes I hear your laugh in places it doesn’t belong.
In the clatter of cafeteria trays.
In the groan of floorboards.
In my own mouth.
Is this what haunting means?
To become someone’s echo?
To be the sound that loneliness makes when it remembers how to sing?
88.
Do you know what it’s like to carry someone inside you
like a second heartbeat?
I feel like a room you left your coat in.
Still warm.
Still waiting.
They say time heals.
But what if I want to stay broken in your shape?
104.
We stood on our desks,
thinking it would bring you back.
As if elevation could cancel erasure.
As if the sky knew how to give boys back to each other.
Keating smiled, but it was a funeral smile.
He clapped, but it sounded like mourning.
We became a choir of broken oaths.
Your name was the hymn we forgot the words to.
126.
They buried you in gray.
You would have hated it.
I wanted to sneak red into your coffin—
A scarf. A petal. A sunset.
A flame.
Instead I whispered:
“O Captain, my Captain,”
and tasted ashes.
The dirt they shoveled onto you had your father’s voice.
I wanted to scream.
But all I could do was rhyme.
151.
I keep a photo of us from the play.
Your face is turned.
Mine is watching you.
This is how it always was.
You were the stage.
I was the audience.
Clapping,
aching,
silent.
Do you know what it's like to fall in love with someone mid-monologue,
only to realize their scene ends before yours?
173.
Did it hurt?
Were you alone?
Did you think of me?
Did you hate me for staying?
Did you think I was a coward?
Would you have forgiven me if I knocked on your window?
Or would you have already flown?
Did you want me to follow you?
Would you have kissed me goodbye?
184.
I think you would’ve kissed me, if I asked.
I think I would’ve asked, if I was braver.
But I was the quiet one.
And you—
You were the final line I never said aloud.
Now I mouth it in mirrors, just to see if my lips remember yours.
Still.
I hold the punctuation.
I wait for the end of your sentence.
It hasn’t come.
It never will.
200.
The other boys forget.
They move on.
They join clubs.
They shave.
They dance.
They kiss girls.
They laugh.
And I—
I write to a ghost
with your name.
You are my major.
My thesis.
My unsolvable metaphor.
My favorite unresolved chord.
213.
Do you know what it’s like
to be seventeen and carrying a requiem in your mouth?
To swallow grief like communion?
To speak only in elegies?
I kissed poetry because you wouldn’t let me kiss you.
255.
I read your favorite book and underlined every line you would have loved.
I read it again.
And again.
Until it tore.
Then I slept with the pages under my pillow,
as if I could dream you back into the margins.
You are always between the lines.
Even now, I read everything twice—
Once for the plot, once for the part where you might have been.
300.
There was a day I almost followed.
Almost.
The window was open.
The sky was kind.
The wind said “Come.”
But then—
I heard your voice in the back of my head:
“Don’t.”
So I stayed.
And cried.
And hated you for stopping me.
And loved you for it too.
What a terrible thing, Neil, to love a ghost more than the living.
333.
I wrote you a poem in blood once.
Don’t worry.
Not mine.
Just metaphor.
(But if metaphor is truth’s shy cousin—
I still owe you a pint.)
I bleed sonnets now.
Every poem is a cut in your shape.
I sign my name with your absence.
390.
You’re in every poem now.
Even the ones about birds,
and rain,
and peaches,
and the way the moon always looks a little bit like a half-closed eye.
You wink at me,
and I never know if you’re flirting
or saying goodbye again.
(Probably both. You always did love dramatic exits.)
444.
I still don’t speak much.
But when I do,
it’s all for you.
Even if the others don’t know it.
Even if they never will.
Even if they call it poetry and not confession.
Even if they think I’m healing when I’m just memorizing how it felt to hold your gaze.
500.
Do you know what it means to live with the feeling that someone else had your soul,
and took it with them when they died?
You were my tether.
Now I am a balloon drifting toward elegy.
Will you catch me if I fall?
524.
I saw a boy kiss a boy in public.
No one looked.
No one flinched.
I cried for an hour.
You would have smiled so wide.
567.
I saw your father once.
I didn’t speak.
He didn’t look.
But I wanted to scream,
“This is what you did. This is what you broke.
He could have been everything.
He could have been mine.”
But I just stared.
And he just walked.
And the world stayed wrong.
600.
This is the last line.
Or maybe it’s the first.
I don’t know anymore.
I just wanted you to know—
601.
I loved you.
I love you still.
I will love you longer than the sun remembers to rise.
Even if you never say it back.
Even if your lips are sealed by dirt.
Even if your ghost moves on.
Even if I don’t.
Postscript (an erasure poem from silence):
You are not gone.
You are just—
somewhere I can’t reach,
like a poem whose last stanza fell off the page.
But I still read it aloud.
And I leave a space.
And I wait.
For your line.
Always.