To Be Asked for a Kiss

by Jericho Brown

Suicide's Note
by Langston Hughes

The calm,
Cool face of the river
Asked me for a kiss.

The desire to be dead and the desire not to be alive and the desire to kill oneself are three different desires.

The desire to die is not the desire to be dead. Anyone who has ever been in love knows this.

And though all of these desires seem--to those who have never had them--synonymous with the desire to run away, they are not the desire to run away. Any look at the recent statistics on gay teen suicide is proof of this.

I am, because I've been assigned to think in this way about this poem, trying to remember the last time I wanted to kill myself. I don't have to remember the last time I wanted to die because that would be as simple as remembering the last time I had sex without a condom.

When people ask me to examine a poem I love, they mean for me to dismantle the poem . . . to undress the one I love before them down to his linebreaks, his rhythms, his slick and sustained use of metaphor. They want to know why I love and how they should. They want love coming out of my mouth to be more mathematical than it is in their own lives.

Read the full essay on the Poetry Foundation website.

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