DON’T DIE

By John Tustin

You told me not to die

but I didn’t want to listen to you –

I wanted to die right there and then

or even during that night,

gently in my sleep.

“Don’t die. Not now,” you implored

and I only obeyed you

when you told me how my mother

would be so sad

and then, over time,

she would blame herself.

So I decided to live,

at least for a little while longer.

Now my mother is long dead

and I am still here,

no longer entertaining thoughts

of my own demise, in the time of my choosing,

by my own unsteady hand

in my own unlovely bed.

I can’t use my mother as an excuse anymore

to go on living

and you haven’t shouted out to me,

“Don’t die! Not tonight,”

in years and years

from your distances on bridges,

mountaintops,

sitting on statues of horses

and pretending to ride them.

I thought about doing it tonight,

for the first time in a very long time –

getting it done with a solemn efficiency,

with no fanfare,

without thinking too much about it

and you just sat outside my bedroom door,

asleep and tilted back in your wooden chair

with your hat down over your eyes

and drooling into your shoulder.
My old and lazy sentry,

bored and aged into uselessness.
The moment passed

and I began to think about things

not connected to taut ropes and bottles of pills

all on my own.

I looked up after looking down

and feeling that disconnected desire to jump,

being pulled back by a hand on my shoulder

I finally recognized as mine.

“Don’t die,” I told myself

as the sound of your snoring

came in through the wall

and I began thinking of another thing almost immediately.

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