Clean: An Anthology

Everything Must Go

You don't know where it's from but you know the line.

I want to walk in the snow without leaving footprints.

It's from the Manic Street Preachers. 1994. The Holy Bible. Track six, 4st7lbs. Did you know that a stone is only fourteen pounds? Yeah, do that math. Frontman Richey Edwards was...not the most stable person, let's just say that. And I say was, because nineteen years ago, after a show in Bristol, Richey Edwards straight up disappeared at the age of 27 and to this day, nobody has ever found him.

I distinctly remember being thirteen years old and typing those words into Google to figure out where they were from, and I ended up poring over details of his disappearance for hours.  I wanted desperately to believe he was still alive, still there-- because if he was, it meant there was hope for me as well. But the thing is, I'm sixteen now, and I realise something I never did back then: Richey Edwards is dead, my friend. He's deader than
the flowers his bandmates were sent after the fact, he's deader than the foam on the untouched beer the rest of the band ordered in a South to London pub cover during what would be later dubbed the post-Richey interview, as if he was an event instead of a person, he's dead.

And you want to know how I know he's dead? Not because they found his car by that bridge. Because his ashes are scattered everywhere I look. I know because of the pastel edits and the lyrics over pictures scarred wrists, I know because of the fact that his life has been boiled down to his most desperate hours, it's a pity, really. We've done the same thing we did with Kurt Cobain, we made him into a martyr for our own adolescent guilt and if that isn't the most disrespectful I don't know what is. He was the epilogue, the dark and eventual post-script to the thin girls and scarred wrists on your dashboard and you never even knew it. You never even cared. The people we post have lives, goddamn it, and why can't you respect that? Or, well, they had lives. And I know I'm not blameless here, I spread the out of context quotes and that one stylised picture of his missing persons report just like everyone else. But the damage was done before I came along, it was done before he was declared legally dead in 2008, it was done before all of that.

We killed Richey Edwards forgot about everything else he was, all the other things he did, how he said it that one song that he wanted to destroy White America--isn't that the most punk rock thing you've ever heard?

I want to destroy White America too.

And more than that, I want to be remembered for it. I want to lead crowds of protesters to the best of a drum, I want things that cannot be accomplished in 27 short years, and at sixteen, I find it absolute lunacy that I considered leaving this world before then.

So here's to a new future, here's to Nicky Wire, Sean Moore, and James Bradfield who despite putting a quarter of their proceeds into an account for if Richey ever turns up again still record and do festivals and live beautiful, rock and roll lives, here's to living to old age and smashing the system, here's to no longer worshipping a dead man, here's to footprints in the snow that shatter the Earth.

A/N: I'm done with this anthology! It was getting way too long. Anyways, look out for another one coming soon-ish because I'm definetly not done writing poems. The working title right now is Suburban War, but that might change, because I really don't think anyone is good at titling and doing summaries for poetry collections.