A teenager's bedroom wall is usually a place for the living: bands mid-song, singers mid-grin. In K J Rickis's poem the wall belongs to the dead. The girl at its centre is never named, and the poem hardly describes her at all. We see only what she collects. Its central idea is uncomfortable. These musicians are worth more as corpses than they ever were as performers, and an audience that ignored them in life is happy to adopt them once they are gone.
The opening lines set this out in a deadpan list. "Some had died in aeroplanes, / Some had died in cars, / Some at the end of a needle, / Some at the end of a gun." The repeated "Some" makes death sound like a filing system, with each cause a separate drawer. The causes also darken as the list goes on, from accidents of travel to drugs to violence. Rickis gives the needle and the gun the same phrase, "at the end of", so the two deaths sit on the same level, interchangeable. The tone stays flat and the vocabulary plain. That flatness is how the poem makes its point: the girl has made grief into décor, and the speaker will not decorate the telling.
The key action comes in the seventh line, the longest in the poem, which spills past the rhythm of the lines around it. "From today's paper she cut out a picture, / And pinned up the latest one." The verbs are small and domestic, the kind used for a school project or a scrapbook. They sit oddly beside what is being pinned up, a person's death. "Today's paper" suggests how quickly all of this moves, since yesterday's death is already old news. "The latest one" treats the dead as a series, like stickers or trading cards, with the wall waiting for the next addition.
Then the poem turns. Until line nine it speaks about the girl, and now it speaks to the newest star: "Your glory was but fleeting." The old-fashioned "but" gives the line the sound of an epitaph, and the poem briefly becomes an elegy. The next line gives the sharpest irony: "You never made Number One." The capitalised "Number One" is the music charts, the measure of success in this world. Notice how the poem rhymes it. "One" echoes "gun" in the final line, and it also echoes the lowercase "one" of "the latest one." The star never reaches the top of the charts, but he does become the latest one on the wall, and the poem suggests the gun is what got him there.
The last line is blunt: "And she did not know your name / Till you pulled the trigger of your gun." Judging by the wording, this death is a suicide, though the poem does not say so outright. What it does say is that fame arrived at the moment of death and not before. The girl's attention, which stands in for the public's, switches on only when there is a headline. Rickis lets the reader decide where the blame lies, with the girl, the newspapers, or the whole machinery that sells tragedy as news. The poem looks to me less like an accusation of one teenager than a criticism of a habit of mind that treats loss as something to collect.
The sound of the poem supports this. Only the even-numbered lines rhyme: "stars" with "cars", then "gun", "one", "One" and "gun" again. This gives a simple, singsong, ballad-like feel, almost a nursery rhyme, which jars against the subject matter. The repeated "gun" rhyme closes the poem like a shot, and the end sound returns to where the list began. The unrhymed lines in between leave the poem loose and conversational, as if the speaker is simply telling us what is on the wall.
The poem is worth reading because it says a great deal in twelve lines without raising its voice. It has no moral lecture. It has a list, a pair of scissors, a newspaper clipping and a single sharp turn to "you". By the end the wall of pictures starts to look less like a shrine than a record of how selectively we pay attention.