Ode To Pete Wentz, Ending In Tyler’s Funeral

There is already more than enough blood in your city tonight and yet I know you
are at the edge of another tower of speakers, stacked higher than the dead boys
pulled from the southside and forgotten. To jump knowing you will be caught is a
type of mercy I have never known, yet craved. You can love a whole scene until it
becomes a flooded house, and then I suppose climbing is the only option. Still,
we wore all black every summer like the sun didn’t snarl. Didn’t have teeth, never
wanted to tear into our skin and let the salt of us pour out in waves, or like our
skin wasn’t suspect enough before we decided to be rebels. Before we walked into
corner stores with no money and walked out with chocolate melting against the
warmth of our thighs. We wrote “IGNORE YOUR GOD COMPLEX” in every bathroom stall
on Campus one of those years even though we knew the right lyrics, because on a
night we were too poor afford concert tickets we pressed our backs into a hill
overlooking the LC and let every sound arrive in our spines and throb, and the way
Patrick’s voice swung into the air when singing “Loaded God Complex”, we couldn’t
tell the difference, just knew we discovered a message that had to be delivered on
the walls of places where people emptied themselves of everything they challenged
their body to own. In those days, we were drunk on reaching up and pulling the
night sky apart, swallowing it in chunks, until we were as dark inside as we were out.
Until it held us tight like no one else dared to. We boys and our misery, Pete. I know
you fumble over your instrument. I know your trembling hands approach the strings
like a virgin lover, reaching to pull fabric from the edge of the first person to
whisper their desires in an ear, but if not for the bass, how else would they allow
you to arrive to our outstretched arms? Who else would we have to drag us home by
the collars with the windows down on 270 after another set of hours in a Midwest that
is not like the one in your songs, but if we turn up the music loud enough we can
pretend they aren’t breaking our old neighborhoods into swarms of dust. We can pretend
there aren’t boys running out of scattered glass temples, with their hands raised,
begging for someone to open their chests and let the heat unthaw whatever happiness
they have left. And I know these are just my problems, I know there is blood in your
city that craves the rush of a cold sidewalk every night, that there are so many ways
to stop a city from breathing all at once, to twist it into something sharp and metal
and turn it in on itself, and you can’t possibly fit another tragedy in a song after
all these years, can you? Not even for one of us who fell so in love with his own
loneliness that it became a flooded house and he climbed like you did to the edge of
a rooftop with wet shoes and jumped because Pete, when you were lonely and you
jumped, we sang and held you up to the roof and you survived another night, and
then another year, and you named a son something ridiculous, and we did not have to
bury you underneath a split tree in Columbus. But we still wore black then and every
summer after, we still stole candy bars and planted them on a hill outside the LC and
prayed for them to melt this time into the ghosts of everyone we have ever loved,
and would never see again. Then we lost so many friends that we truly became criminals,
and rummaged through this splintered city to find god because a man outside of a bar
convinced us all of our friends were in heaven and none of us knew any other way
to get there saddled by all of these sins and all of this sadness. Until one night,
drunk off the sky again, we figured maybe we can all get to heaven if we ignore
our god complex. Maybe if we stack all of the speakers in this town as high as
we can and begin to go up, we can escape even this.