The Pleasures of a Normal Man

for Ian Curtis and Joy Division
 
You’ve never quite been right, of course.
That’s why you gravitate
to strange and more ambitious types
who once elucidated what you felt.
 
By where you lived the seas
were like a churning mass; you dealt
yourself two hands of stones
and placed them in your 12-year-old's parka.
 
The suicide might have shocked someone,
but you weren't close enough
to that last permanence.
You sensed something, a music in the trough.
 
Later you would find CDs
attached to a Macclesfield boy
whose light extinguished in the depths
of sadness much like yours, divided from joy.
 
The gritty melancholia, evoking doors
that slam as you climb the destitute stairs
of some lost tenement, peeled and attached
to you. A leech that made sure you endured.
 
Life hasn't been ideal in any sense.
It wasn't easier at 24 than it was at 12,
you did not have the normal man's pleasures,
but warmth at least in a suicide's songs.