That Cool Broken

Maybe it's the season, maybe it's that my birthday is quickly approaching (gag), but I've been continuing to think a lot about loss. Here is another poem by Patrick Lucy, this one grapples beautifully with the understanding of presence and loss.

THAT COOL BROKEN

Just this morning
you were there
when you didn’t

and the alarm kept

I really don’t know
if people still actually
but

I’ve been wearing black

and using your stuff,
borrowing your jacket—
I spent a day in your jockeys

and tried

for the first time since
to jerk off but
(write it)

you were there

when you didn’t
and all our lights went out
because I don’t pay that bill

I can’t

answer the phone—
our machine is full of people
who know you’re there,

pick up, Jonathan,

(write it)
you’re taking much longer to die
than you did.

-Patrick Lucy

Talking about the basis of the poem, Patrick said he had reached a point where "for the first time in my life I think I had a sense of how much a part of my sense of "self" could reside in another person. That led me to consider how the physical loss of that person would result in a period where that person's absence would be so sharply defined it would amount to a presence of sorts. And how that presence might be all that is left of the person, and how hard it might be to move past that."

"That Cool Broken" first appeared in the Wake Forest literary magazine "3 to 4 Ounces."

Previously posted poem by Lucy:
Calls