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A review by shenereads
Love Letters or Suicide Notes by Doc Luben
4.0
The poem. Watch it being performed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLC5PJtWBigV11CpHYOLpPmPKOlrG1P2VL&time_continue=1&v=Iy4cEW15SdE&feature=emb_logo
“14 Lines from Love Letters or Suicide Notes
1. Don’t freak out.
2. We’ve both known this has been coming for a long time.
3. I’ve been staying awake at night wondering if I should tell you.
4. I bought the kind of crackers you like to eat, they are in the hall cupboard.
5. Now that we have watched all the episodes of ‘True Blood’ I do not know what else to do next
6. I always imagined this would happen without warning like suddenly on a ocean cliff side, but this is the kind of thing where waiting for the time to be right would just mean waiting forever.
7. I’ve just been too afraid for too long
8. I came home on Tuesday and found all of the chairs that I own stacked in a tower in the center of my kitchen. I don’t know how long they have been like that, but it could only be me that did it. its the kind of thing a ghost might do to prove to the living that he is still there. I am haunting my own apartment.
9. My grandmother was still alive when I was 5 years old, and she asked me to check and see if the iron was hot enough yet, so I pressed my hand against it and it was red and screaming for hours.
25 years later, she would still sometimes apologize. In the middle of conversations, “I feel so bad about making you touch the iron,” she’d say as though it had just happened. I can not imagine how we forgive ourselves for all the things we didn’t say until it was too late. But how else do you tell if something is hot but to touch it?
10. I keep imagining my furniture in your apartment.
11. I wonder how many likes this would get on Facebook.
12. My dad always used to tell the same joke, but I can’t remember the punchline.
13. I was 8 years old and it took 3 weeks — three 8 year old weeks, imagine — to gather everything that I would need to be Batman: Rope, boomerangs, a Mardi Gras mask with beads cut off. I couldn’t find a cave near my house so I buried them all in a bundle under the ivy.
For years after, I tried to find that spot again. The ivy grew too fast, I searched in so many spots, it seemed impossible that I had missed one, but I never found it.
How can something be there, and then not be there?
How do we forgive ourselves for all the things we did not become?
14. I never had the courage to buy bright green sheets. I wanted them but thought they were too brash even with no one but me to see them. I bought a set yesterday and put them on the bed. I knew that you would like them.”
“14 Lines from Love Letters or Suicide Notes
1. Don’t freak out.
2. We’ve both known this has been coming for a long time.
3. I’ve been staying awake at night wondering if I should tell you.
4. I bought the kind of crackers you like to eat, they are in the hall cupboard.
5. Now that we have watched all the episodes of ‘True Blood’ I do not know what else to do next
6. I always imagined this would happen without warning like suddenly on a ocean cliff side, but this is the kind of thing where waiting for the time to be right would just mean waiting forever.
7. I’ve just been too afraid for too long
8. I came home on Tuesday and found all of the chairs that I own stacked in a tower in the center of my kitchen. I don’t know how long they have been like that, but it could only be me that did it. its the kind of thing a ghost might do to prove to the living that he is still there. I am haunting my own apartment.
9. My grandmother was still alive when I was 5 years old, and she asked me to check and see if the iron was hot enough yet, so I pressed my hand against it and it was red and screaming for hours.
25 years later, she would still sometimes apologize. In the middle of conversations, “I feel so bad about making you touch the iron,” she’d say as though it had just happened. I can not imagine how we forgive ourselves for all the things we didn’t say until it was too late. But how else do you tell if something is hot but to touch it?
10. I keep imagining my furniture in your apartment.
11. I wonder how many likes this would get on Facebook.
12. My dad always used to tell the same joke, but I can’t remember the punchline.
13. I was 8 years old and it took 3 weeks — three 8 year old weeks, imagine — to gather everything that I would need to be Batman: Rope, boomerangs, a Mardi Gras mask with beads cut off. I couldn’t find a cave near my house so I buried them all in a bundle under the ivy.
For years after, I tried to find that spot again. The ivy grew too fast, I searched in so many spots, it seemed impossible that I had missed one, but I never found it.
How can something be there, and then not be there?
How do we forgive ourselves for all the things we did not become?
14. I never had the courage to buy bright green sheets. I wanted them but thought they were too brash even with no one but me to see them. I bought a set yesterday and put them on the bed. I knew that you would like them.”