Ode to the letter Y

This is bullshit you're a fucking shitstain piece of vomit and I'm going to hate you forever you fucking asshole. How'd you do it? Smoking a bent and flattened cigarette like a true hipster? Twenty seven years old just like your fucking idols, what song did you play on vinyl? How'd you fucking do it? How? How?

You fucking cunt-barrel sewage seeping slipknot sucker punch sour puss laundry boots—who the fuck is even left to write about you? Who? Who?

I wish I could but I only write for myself. When Karen did it, my poems were bowling lanes with rubber bumpers, rhymes thrown at random, caught in heated rhythm, poetic devices triggered like coping mechanisms because as long as the words keep bouncing, I can spend the time at least that I'm reciting that garbage click-shit-bubble-wrap distracted and not thinking about Karen.

But your poem. Your poem scooped life up with a spoon and pooped it right into our ears. Your poem was hot soup with spice and onion and cheese to pack our bellies full with heat so we could survive winter, with a cigarette for after. And if you were only here to lay down those sutures like you did every time before, maybe this wouldn't hurt so bad. But your exit wound is bleeding from all the places your words used to fix because I don't even have you anymore to share all this pain with. Where did you go? Where? Where?

Your words added salt to pull the flavor out of the bland. Your words were the hand in the blender picking out the seeds as the days all started running together. Your words were a wild white wine wired wide from Hawaii—why. Why. Why?

Y is a letter glued to my mind. It's shaped like a fork in the road with two paths, one trod daily, and the other not as often but still too much. Y like a fork in my gut—why did you kill yourself? Why did I abandon you? Where did I go? I could have stopped this if I wasn't so selflish. I wish I could have told you