8 September 1993 – 19 July 2012 – R.I.P J.M.

R.I.P J.M

YOU’RE GONE

They dug him a grave six feet deep within the pallid earthly dirt amidst God’s acre

He is gone – a Priest announced sympathetically. Too young for his life to be over

After the cerise and snowy-white roses were gracefully cast upon his brown coaxed coffin; they covered his ashen body’s casket under a coat of soil, and a tile of risen concrete protection

The patch around his gravestone gradually becoming stonewashed
As the years of that significant date’s memorial’s winter sun shone down upon it evermore

I now realise the existence of the demons he’d been facing
My hands clenched in fists as I realised that even I – who’d also been hiding behind a façade – had not seen through his

Now I talk to him
I ask him as I gaze to the stars above

What is it like after death?

People say they do not understand where your actions came from but I know what you felt and fought for so long
I sombrely apologize that they had not caught you in time

I realise now the sorrow you had hidden behind your contagious smiles
The compassion and care you had for others were a compensation for when you had to go

Your musical talent were a gift from the Gods to try and let you know you had a purpose here
Yet so caught up in misery you were blind to this

I hate that I was blind to it too

I should have seen through your mental make-up
I felt the same
It drives me insane to know that I could have saved you

I should have!

We may not have been close friends but we were companions enough

I do not know if you ever look down upon me; but I think of you all the time
Especially whence caught up in despair;
I whisper to the stars
Hoping one of them is you and in turn, you can hear me

I know not if my voice had ever reached you
Hitherto – each time whence I had been ready to go – I had cried out
Cried out to you for guidance to show me that there is a life outside of living
Yet every sign you showed me were to stay here, on earth.

Do you feel regret?
Or do you feel freedom?

Help me Jacob.

I pray every night for someone to hear me and let me know what to do
For I am trapped in this limbo, fatiguing and afraid I’ll never be able to elude this angst.

Are you happy Jacob?
Are you free Jacob?

Or are you stuck in the afterlife,
Regretting your decision?

Please reply to me
I have no idea what to do, no idea where to go from here

Should I rob potentially sixty more years of my life from myself?
Or should I continue walking this earth in despair; confined in an arduous travesty of misery and pain we call reality?

Without drugs I cannot sleep
For my body and mind are tormenting me
I have the insight to acknowledge the understanding of my responsibilities
I just do not have the mentality to bodily handle them in a correct manner

I can answer my own questions I contend with, unaided
But alas I cannot carry out the actions – in which they say to be a precise coping method

All here trying to help me – telling me to stay, but I do not want to
I’ve lost faith behind the reasoning to do so

I want to join you, hopefully in a better place
I be not afraid of meeting you in a different realm
I be afraid of leaving the people here in this world

For a short period of time
The predictable emotions of sadness and heartbrokenness for your loved ones filled me

Yet as my darkness began to suffocate me
Erratic jealousy tore at me
Taunting me with repeated words of I being a coward
For I had never found the courage within me
To jump that final leap into the afterworld as you had

Envy even dared to haunt me
For I desired to be liberated from my torment as you are

I continue to gaze upon the stars
Knowing that when I look at them
I am not alone
For you had harrowingly walked the same path as I still do

Yet now I have halted at the intersection, wondering which direction to take

Do I follow in your footsteps?
Or do I go a separate way?

I have spent so many days feeling so desolated and without hope
The scars running deep on my body both inner and in the flesh

I yearn to place my body in a grave, laying by your side
Relinquishing to the demons that haunt people like us

I miss you and I wish I could hear from you
My heart breaks in wretchedness

Help me escape limbo please Jacob.

I am still alive, yet sometimes I forget
Thus becoming dissociated from reality
Incoherent to the painful sensation
Yet conceding it to be far too tangible for it to be a dream

I am awake, but I am animating within a lucid nightmare

Please Jacob
Heed my pleas
And help me out

Are you at ease where you are?
Or are you still caught up in your disconsolation?

Rest in peace my friend
And please, please, I beg of you
Please contact me
And let me know what I should do

I am smothering myself with the daunting essence when I think of the future
Every breathe I take simply feels like a mistake

I have become so tender and sensitive
I have become whom you had been
Stuck in the same empty shell
Barely holding on

I want to be able to be more like you and less like me
I want to surrender to the darkness
For I fear that earth holds no light

Yet you shine your light in the form of a star through to me amidst the darkness of the night

So perhaps I am simply floundering in insanity
To not see; that the deceased shine their light upon us every night

Must it be a sign?

A sign that even during the darkest hours of our existences
There is always a sort of light shimmering upon us
Telling us to express contentment to be breathing
For you are all looking down on us, smiling in blissful woe
As you wish you could all still be amongst the living

I had always felt happy for you,
For you had found the freedom you yearned for, for so long

Now I realise that I am forlorn,
Morose on all you have missed out on
Sad as I see how your friends and family are without your presence

It took me to be institutionalised for me to realise this

One of the many glistening stars above me is you
The stars are our Guardian Angels
Bringing us divine light through our tormenting darkness

I see it now
I may not be completely freed
Still, I see the light on earth now
No doubt, highlighted through your grace

Yet it brings me no comfort to simply see the light
I yearn to be the light
I wish to be a gleaming star
Laying by your side for all eternity

Rest in Peace Jacob,
Until the day
When the time is right
We’ll surely meet again