Joey

Joey always told me, laughing, as though
it were actually a joke, that he wanted
to kill himself but it was never the right

time. There were always groceries
to be bought and little brothers
to be tucked in at night. Don't worry.

Joey isn't going to kill himself
twenty more lines into this poem. That's not
the kind of story I'm telling here.

Joey got a promotion and now he can
afford Prozac. Joey is Joe now. Joe
is a cold engine in which none of the parts

complain. Joe is a brick someone made
out of fossils. If you removed money
from the equation, Joey would have been painting

elk on cave walls. People would have fed him
and kept him away from high places
because goddamn, look at those elk. I think

that the genes for being an artist and mentally ill
aren't just related, they are the same
gene, but try telling that to a bill collector.

We were 17, and I drove us all to punk shows
in a station wagon older than any of us. We were
17 and I bought lunch for Joey more often

than I didn't. We were 17 and the one time Joey
tried to talk to me about being depressed
when someone else was around, I told him to

shut the hell up and asked if he needed to change
his tampon. You know that moment when the cartoon
realizes he's taken three steps off the cliff

and he takes a long look at the audience
like we are carrying the last moving box
out of a half-empty house? Joey looked like that

without the puff of smoke. He just played
video games for half an hour and then went home. Once
I found Joey in my dad's office, staring at the safe

where he knew we kept the guns. Once Joey
molded his car into the shape of a tree trunk
and refused to give a reason why. I once caught

Joey in Biology class staring at his scalpel
like he wanted to be the frog, splayed out,
wide open, so honest. There's one difference

between me and Joey. When we got arrested,
bail money was waiting for me at the station.
When I was hungry, I ate. When I wanted to

open myself up and see if there really were
bees rattling around in there, my parents got me
a therapist. I can pinpoint the session

that brought me back to the world. That session
cost seventy-five dollars. Seventy-five dollars
is two weeks of groceries. It's a month of bus fare.

It's not even a school year's worth of new shoes.
It took weeks of seventy-five dollars to get to the one
that saved my life. We both had parents that believed

us when we said we weren't OK, but mine could afford
to do something about it. I wonder how many kids
like Joey wanted to die and were unlucky enough

to actually pull it off. How many of those kids
had someone who cared about them but also
had to pay rent? I'm so lucky that right now

I'm not describing Joey's funeral. I'm so
lucky we all lived through who we were
to become who we are. I'm so lucky I'm so - lucky.