i tried to pray, but god left me to decay.
i watched your smile evaporate
with rain puddles on a sunny day.

wasting away, anxiety had its claws in me
and i dragged you underneath
depression’s crushing, tidal wave.

i think i finally realized:
this was all my mistake
but, by now, i’m afraid it’s far too late.

i wonder how many sons
and how many daughters
passed on
before the phrase,
“Only the good die young”
became cliché.

how many had to grieve
before the phrase
lost its sting?
surely, i still feel
the potent scream
of its veracity.

“only the good die young.”
like all axioms,
we could unpackage and dissect,
trim away the fat
and try to understand,
but at the end of the day
it seems to me that we’d only be
helplessly clutching at straws
in vain attempts to try and make sense
of a reality that our human brains—
try as they might—could never fathom.

i cannot say
if the aphorism is true,
if only the good die young,
but i know that Jakin Murray Foster,
beyond a shadow of a doubt,
was one of the good ones.

to try and select
a single story
as exemplary
of Jakin’s life
would be akin
to plucking a star
from a constellation.

surely, that story
would shine like a sun
unto itself.
people would rotate
about that story,
anchored like planets
by the gravitational force
of Jakin’s compassion.
but to do so,
to focus on solely one story,
would be a great disservice
to the cosmos of Jakin’s existence,
all the lives he’s touched
and changed over the years.

instead, i will try to tell you
about the man, my best friend,
my brother: Jakin Murray Foster.
i will try to capture a portrait,
one that will, admittedly,
be woefully incomplete.
i will leave you to fill in the blanks,
the empty spaces
between the disparate stars
of his constellation.
the gaps in my description
can be filled by the memories
of his cheer, his integrity,
his profound humanity,
solid as steel beams
buttressing and bracing
in these moments of grief.

so, let’s reminisce:

Jakin was stubborn as an ox.
this quality stands out to me
in perfect clarity
because he was one of the only people
who had the strength of personality
required to challenge me
to become a better human being.

to check me when i grew cruel or aggressive or inconsiderate.
to encourage me when i became callous and cynical and unkind.
to love me when my heart was hateful
and wanted nothing more than to spread my own misery like a poison
before putting a permanent end to everything.

Jakin was silly.
take a gander at any number of the photos collected in his memory.
they paint a clearer picture than i ever could
of a man who laughed loud and laughed often,
but never at the expense of others.
who could lift your spirits
like a steaming cup of coffee
in even the most frigid winters.

Jakin was a geek,
a home-school kid,
a Jesus freak.
his personality was refined
by the teachings of a radical rabbi
executed by the state
for standing in love and solidarity
with the weak,
a man who’d change the course of history.

in brief, Jakin gave a ****.
until the end, he stood up for what he believed in,
convinced by the clarity of his conscience
and the fire that burned like a burgeoning nebulae in his heart.
i can think of no better way to honor his memory
than to hate what is evil
and love what is good,
to fight for a world that is in such desperate need
of the grace, charity, and fraternity
Jakin exhibited every day.

Memento mori.
be mindful of death.
i think of the end of all things daily.
for many, the end of a life is the beginning of something new.
to me, death makes life invaluable.
death is choiceless.
death is a cruelty, an injustice no one should ever suffer.
like a mirror, death shows us our own fragility,
it gives truth to the reality that our time here is fleeting.
death makes life more precious than any commodity ever wrought by humanity.
death reminds us that we are owed nothing,
that all we can do is seize every moment of love and joy afforded us
and build a new world in the shell of the old.

i do not know if only the good die young.
i know that my best friend, my brother, is gone.
i know with certainty that I will never see him again.
we will never laugh together,
bicker over philosophy,
or drive around listening to music ever again.
that reality fills me with so much misery
i can hardly stand or breathe or even think.
but i will do all i can to be a good man
so that when i too meet Death like an old friend,
i can say, “i lived like Jakin.”

like the period at the conclusion
of a sentence, i just want to end.
hemorrhaging anxiety, bereft
of comfort’s tourniquet.
bend back my fingers till they snap
and distract me from the stress—
a constant threat
of white-hot pinched-nerves.

torch me alive like a burnt sacrifice.
sew my eyelids open so i never forget
perspectives that shift my world
like Atlas, adjusting his weary load.
grind down my bones, scatter me
to the furthest reaches of the cosmos.
i cannot bear another moment
in this lonely corner of the universe.

cut my throat, let me bleed out
and seep back into the dust
from whence i came. humor me:
we all nurse fantasies of death
from time to time. let me cope
in peace so i can make it
through another dead-end day
in one piece.

prisms breathe rainbows  
but i can only see in monochrome.
colorblind, i can’t grasp
much beyond shades of gray photographs,
chewing shards of broken glass
while i confine knife-sharp memories
in the fragile corners of my mind.

buried every evening in the sludge
of tedium, i trudge to the beat
of a broken drum, struck dumb
by the knowledge that all of this
is completely ******* meaningless.
too weak to pretend i possess
any semblance of control.

rise like the walking dead
from the open tomb
of a cold and empty bed.
yearning for the bliss of oblivion,
embrace the infinite abyss
of nothingness that awaits us all
just around the bend.

a knotted rope
hangs like a halo
over my head.
hope inscribed
in fragile reveries misread.
phantom limbs entwined
inside this bed
are nothing
but a cancer that leave me
wishing i was dead.

sleeping on street-corners
awash in yellow light,
haunted by the ghosts
of twilight’s resurrected life.
pervasive city smog
smothers distant nebulae.
restless,
i claw at my own skin,
desperate for respite.

the door
is cracked and ajar,
but you don’t want me
anymore.
so sew my eyelids open,
dig your needle in my skull.
tattoo tattered fragments
of memories i can’t forget.

sun-starved flowers sit on the windowsill,
yellow daffodils wilt. petals litter
the turntable—balanced precariously beneath,
needle tilted and askew. a record spinning out of tune.

repeat. repeat the same refrain, a lyric
trapped and contained within a cage.
a melody at once profound, but it’s grown
harder to find the harmony now.

breathe in the decay, a forgotten bouquet
left alone and in the shade. a gift
better left behind, “the patient, cut-flower sound
of a man who’s waiting to die.”

we plant white lies like seeds in the fertile soil of stories—
perfect as a magic bean, we’ll climb skyscraper-high
to a world of gods and giants.

when reality sets in, cold as a vise and just as tight,
it’s unsurprising we cling desperately to soothing fictions.
given enough hope and rope, we’ll tie our own noose.

we’ve memorized the plot-lines,
can trace the hero’s journey
as the veins in our hands.

in fairy tales and holy texts, they say,
“love will save the day.” but i have never met
someone who can take the pain away.