A Sonnet for Nicholas Hughes

Each suicide writes a new life story
With obvious portents like something out of Dreiser
Or like the junior high school poem Richard Corey,
Where, once he's done it, we're so much wiser
To the heavy-foreshadowed script;
The way the doomed life simply slipped
From one heavy-handed plot point to another.

Yes, heavy-handed plotting for the heavy-handed
Who banded plastic bags and smothered.
And yet if we were absolutely candid
We'd see our retrospectives as ordinary fables,
A filling-in of horror-gaps, grief-caesuras,
Narratives that turn unstable stable,
And, in their foolish fond old art, cure us.