A Lantern Made of Suicide Notes: Suicide by Metaphors
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A Lantern Made of Suicide Notes:
Suicide by Metaphors
Daniel Henry Rodgers
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WARNING: DEALS WITH SUICIDE
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"The ink is not the hand that guides it
for it is the spirit that seeks to escape through its veins
leaving behind
the wounds of creation and the artistic scars
of those who came before."
-Poet
==============================
I. The Hour of Approach
The poem I was writing refused to end—
it kept writing me.
Blood didn't ink these lines—
the ink bled me.
Each stanza a hidden-hematoma
across the white of nothingness.
Somewhere, midnight faltered,
and I was no longer alone.
II. Visitation: Sylvia Plath
Sivvy came barefoot,
bees orbiting her temples,
the sound of crockery breaking
behind her smile.
“I took a deep breath,” she said,
“but the brag’s gone.
Now the heart mutters through marzipan nightmares.”
Her eyes were bell jars, thick with steam.
In one hand, a teacup cradled
six dead stingers.
I tried to look away—
she pressed them against my tongue
and said,
“Be still. Taste legacy.”
“Dying is an art” she murmured
“I perform it exceptionally well.”
III. Visitation: Anne Sexton
Anne stepped out of a cindercloud Cadillac,
pearls tangled in her wrists like regret.
A Marlboro’s red tip blinked like an ambulance
in her funeral smile.
“They loved me best dead,”
she laughed, “so I stayed that way.”
She pulled a black lipstick from her purse,
scrawled ‘Confession is possession’
across my ribs.
“Be naked, darling.
Be lyric.
But never free.”
Then she fed me
a moth that tasted like
my mother’s voice.
"I've sealed my confessions," she ejaculated
"in the hollow bones of winter."
IV. Visitation: Ernest Hemingway
Papa brought a marlin’s glass eye in a leather pouch
and laid it beside his flask.
His stare was a thunderhead
over still waters
his silence heavier than all his words.
“You want the end?
Make it clean. No adjectives.
Truth is a knife, sharp pressed against your back."
He unzipped my chest with
a look.
Inside:
a typewriter with a trigger
each key marked with a country he had fled.
"You stand at the edge for so long, you forget
where the cliff begins and where it ends."
V. Descent
They didn’t come to comfort.
They came to feed.
Each verse I bled,
they devoured.
Each metaphor
unraveled in their teeth.
I was not a poet.
I was a feast a filleted
tortured artist
VI. The Coming of Poe
Edgar entered like a final stanza—
slow, inevitable,
wearing a raven-shaped metronome
and mirror-black gloves.
His eyes strapped thunder
to shadow.
“I watched your pen become a spade,”
he chortled.
“And every poem you wrote,
a shallower grave.”
He held out a lantern made of
scraps of all their suicide notes.
It was perfumed with genius,
with torment,
with rot,
the sweet decay of immortality
VII. Collapse (Meta-Erosion)
And then—
the
poem
fractured—
no
longer lines
just
hemorrhage
(syllables tearing
like
skin)
I tried to scream
but
ink
filled
my
lungs—
the page folded
in on itself
like a dying
star
VIII. The Finality
Edgar bent close.
His voice was the ticking
of a clock without hands.
“You thought you summoned us,”
he chuckled.
“But we summoned you.”
He smirked.
The ink on my skin began to move.
It formed one word:
YOURS
IX. Curse
And if you read this far—
don’t lie to yourself.
You’re not safe.
You’ve tasted it…..the
tyranny inner critic
perfectionism
You’re already
writing
that
next
line.
The poem is over.
But you are not.
.
.
.
Copyright © Daniel Henry Rodgers | Year Posted 2025
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