Our Kingdom Inside A Casket Poem by Chase Gagnon

Where have you gone my love, and why are you breathing? You said you felt dead in my arms but I know you've been reincarnated in his. I want you to be under the ground with me, cuddling in a lightless box wondering how the world outside is changing. I wanted to spiral into an unsavable depression with you. I wanted to build our own world, our own little afterlife six feet under the dirt of that depression... It wouldn't have be much, but it would've been our kingdom inside a casket where we would lay cuddling in tears, picking which worms to let inside our bodies and which ones to condemn. We would've been gods, sitting together on a throne no one else could see.

I wanted to be reclusive with you, never surfacing as our skin peels away with holes from dirty needles. We would've been skeletons living off the invisible government, the new American dream! Was my apartment not a cozy enough coffin for you to spend eternity? Or was it the smell of those rotting cats in the garbage bag I kept in the closet to accompany us into the next life? I promise you, if you step one foot on my grave I'll reach up from the dirt and drag you down with me, into a plot so deep that no medication could ever pull you back towards the sun. I wanted you to be my crying queen, I wanted you to grow pale as me in my lightless world hazed by sage and cannabis incense. You would've been everything to me, not because I loved you but because depression is no fun when you're in it alone — and you're the only one I thought I could drag with me. I'm rotting away, and soon gravediggers will find me in this stuffy apartment, lifeless with the needle still in my arm as you walk down the aisle to wedding bells under a setting sun.