Golden Gate Bridge
San Francisco, California
1937
A wonder of the modern world has been created
Built of steel
This, magnificent span
after the four year of struggle of
relentless winds,
blinding fog,
rocks embedded underneath the water
prepared to gouge you from the inside out
and treacherous tides ready to tear you apart
A technical masterpiece
that can only be described
in superlative terms
Many said that a suspension bridge was impossible
but on May 27th 1937
Joseph Strauss proved the engineering world wrong
a one-mile-wide,
three-mile-long channel
between the San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean
This is the Golden Gate Bridge
The Frommers travel guide describes the bridge as number one of the four hundred and eighty eight things to do in the city
But if you think that's a high number
wait until you hear this,
one thousand six hundred
One thousand six hundred
bodies have been recovered from the water
One thousand six hundred people
stood on the edge and contemplated taking their lives
had fear embedded in their eyes
tired of tides rolling down their cheeks
during unsteady seas
tired, of being suspended admis a violent storm
One thousand six hundred could've been your classmate
your co worker
your son
your daughter
and all you saw in them
was a beautiful structure with iron work bones
who could carry itself
You didn't see the suspension cables
they manufactured across their wrist
You didn't see them starting to rust
deteriorate, rot, weaken, bend, break,
that there are limits and maximums
You didn't see that bridges can only take so much
before they cave in
San Francisco, California
September 24, 2000
19 year old Kevin Hines
throws himself head first over the 4 foot rail
Dives down at 45 miles per hour
His body turns and hits the water in the sitting position
taking the impact to his lower torso,
shattering three vertebrae,
lacerating his lower organs,
and 6 years later he stated,
“There was a millisecond of free fall. In that instant, I thought, what have I just done? I don’t want to die.”
He is one of the 34 people who survived
San Francisco, California
May 7th 2015
I don't really want to die either
but as I stand on the edge
gravity feels so much heavier
when you're 220 feet from what's to be the marking
on a coordinate grid of lives that couldn't be saved
X axis, a type of tired sleep would never fix
Y axis, defeat
Connect the dots,
add it together,
make me a number,
turn my death into another statistic,
Divide my value again and again
until you figure out how such a happy child
turned out to be this way
Did you line up the decimals?
Did you ask them how their day was?
Did you follow the order of operations?
Did you follow after them into the bathroom?
Did you hear them crying behind closed doors?
Rewrite, reevaluate, until you figure out where I land
So I stand above this
rigid rocked ocean floor resting place
and I believe I know why it's called the Golden Gate
Because we were all just scared kids
with splitting cables and crushed beams
and broken hearts
hoping that if this is hell
Golden Gates must be awaiting
the oxidized minds and loss bolted happiness,
that rattled inside the skulls of those who believed they were angels who could fly
so they could still get into heaven
if they killed themselves
Every 40 seconds 50 cars cross the bridge
Every 40 seconds someone commits suicide
So as I find myself unable to throw myself over
I think, how could you die in such a breathtaking place?
I imagine Joseph Strauss
and how much pride spills at the corners of the engineer’s smile
and the splash that it makes
but we aren't too different from what he built
There is beauty constructed inside all of us
it just depends on how well you're able hold yourself up