POETRY
The Deep End
Here’s a tautology
You’re either alive or you’re dead
(the comatose are dead until they are alive)
(while everyone else is alive until they are dead)
There’s no kiddie pool
Outside of the sad chart in the hospital
That someone’s forced to look at every time the doctor has to say that
It’s not a boy it’s not a girl it’s nothing
A dead vessel
For expectations that now lie dead in the water
I wasn’t one of those children so now I’m standing on the edge of the pool
I remember being five years old
Parent-approved rubber straightjackets around my arms
The yellow rubber digging into my skin
The pain keeping me afloat
The water was too cold
I got no further than my ankle
Before the oh so predictable tears came
They had tissues but they still forced me to trust the armbands
I also remember being sixteen
Standing at the edge of a lake in Switzerland
I should specify
The lake was a couple of metres below me
The rocks were not
No one knew it then but I jumped because I was a boy
And boys are dumb and reckless and bloody
I’d only gotten the latter right so far
But god I tried so hard
And so I also remember the air
How it wasn’t there all of a sudden
It got so cold so fast
Ten thousand ton of water weighing down on me
All contained in a metre or so
Above my head
I remember coming up again
My hair sticking to my mouth
Silencing my brain’s cry for air
For just a second longer
My classmates cheered for me
Stereotypically,
the only girl who’d jumped
Their faces were obscured by the sun
Turning them from half-familiar to purely strange
And yet despite this whole poem
I do not remember ever believing that this is what heaven actually looks like
I was never able to convince myself that the people on the other side would cheer
I don’t think there’s anyone at all there
I would/will/could leave all of earth’s life behind
In favour of a black hole
The deep end is empty
Nothing but chlorine and piss
Then again
I am an empiricist
Andrew Kasey is a young writer who was born and raised in Belgium but now studies English Literature in the UK. Andrew will read and write anything, but his preferred genres are horror, poetry, and nonfiction.