Young Writers Society

8. Deleted

They asked me to erase your name
from every system, all the sacred sarcophagi
where you still existed.
Like it was nothing,
just another day at the office
but you were gone.

You were gone before, for Halloween,
when I laid the skeleton across your desk,
another toy soldier in our age-old conflict.
When you came back,
your retaliation was laughter
but the world
has a bad sense of humour.

We made a truce before Christmas,
it lingered, was extended;
immortalised when extenuating circumstances
took you out of the game.
The battlefield was empty
but for a card
from me to you.

You said it was very British of me,
you meant it as a compliment
but it was also a very British headline:
...man stabbed to death in west London;
no mention of your culture,
not the wife who walked with you,
or the daughter waiting at home for her daddy
on December 22, 2017.

At the end, they played your music
and your daughter skipped to the church,
a comet etching through
a darkening universe.
Your wife says we should smile the smiles
you dropped like feathers from your wings.
Maybe when I've stopped being angry,
I will.

Yesterday, I threw away our mattress
after weeks of watching your scent rise
from the sheets like a pool's breath
on a cool morning. With bent springs
and corners worn as the clothes we slept in
on Saturday afternoons, that bed saw two years
of restless nights spent tossing and turning
in the puddles of our hair. Back then,
we were messes, leaving behind
snowflakes of our souls and
sprinkles of our bones
everywhere we went.
Now, we're nothing

(without the mattress
that knew the shape
of our bodies better
than anyone else).