A boy in my school killed himself.
They named the media room after him.
I guess he liked that class.
They don’t know why he did it,
they say,
but he didn’t talk to anyone
and he struggled in lessons
and he didn’t get social situations
or know how to deal with bullying.
They never teach you how to deal with bullying.
My mates da’ killed himself.
It was a shock to us all,
and we was too young to handle it,
but he was going through a divorce
and he was always a quiet one
and he didn’t know how to handle it —
two kids and a wife gone.
Now those two kids
don’t have a da’ no more.
Another mate of mine told me,
sat in a pub with a pint,
that he stood over a ledge once
on a dark night at his darkest point
and considered it
but he drank a lot
and sniffed a lot
and his da’ weren’t around to teach him
how to deal with that shit.
My Grandma always wanted to kill herself
she’d tell my mum
while she was growing up
and when she was a grown up
but her sister drowned when she was young
and her mother beat her
and her husband died 20 years too early.
I wanted to kill myself.
I was going to kill myself.
My head hurt from all the negativity
and those same drinks and drugs my mate used
weren’t working
and my da’ weren’t around to guide my emotions
and those teachers didn’t teach me
and I felt alone I was alone
and I didn’t know where home was.
But I didn’t.
And I don’t really know why.
I guess I just didn’t get round to it
and life went on.
I was going to kill myself,
my grandma was going to,
my mate was,
my mates da’ did,
and that poor boy did too.
© H. R. Sinclair 2025Thank you for listening to my spoken word. This poem was originally published in Black Coffee Poetry’s Suicide Anthology: Part II.
Read this piece and 18 others in our collection.
Share this post