A Chemical Suicide

Trembling, he sits and waits for the news.

His mother called during a Chemistry

test, his favorite class.

“Tyler,” she said,

“I need you, come home.”

He never heard such sorrow

Soaked into her voice

Like water to an overwrought sponge.

It leaked from her, dripped

from every word and froze

on the back of his neck

while he ran two blocks home

his backpack left on the back of a chair.

He sat in the Emergency Room

listening to the mix of beeps from separate

heart monitors and the shuffling of feet

across the symmetrical white tile.

He found it hard to breathe

in the sterility of what they claimed

to be Oxygen in the large waiting room.

He didn’t have asthma but the way he took

each breath could have fooled the best of doctors.

A drowning man’s dying breath

couldn’t compare to the oxygen he lacked,

couldn’t compare to the battle his lungs

fought to keep working properly.

He desperately looked around

For a single air bubble to breathe in,

A sliver of hope that could possibly save a life.

A lone high-shrilled beep

and it was all done.

White lab coat walking over,

the sterility of his hands

Like the bleached bones of Death.

Apologies, meaningless words

said over and over to hundreds

of thousands daily. He stared

at his own hands that still twitched

with the answers to his chemistry test.

Hands that had only known a world

Of education now squeezing

Each other tighter and tighter

As if the pin-pricks of heated discomfort                      

could bring his mother back to him.