Trees
grow out of moss
graves, roots
pushing their way through
bones. We
would all like to think we are
forever, but
trees will grow for so much
longer, through
the shards of our
skeletons, long
after our fragile eternities
are over.

You laugh
in the rain, feeling guilty
for laughing in
a graveyard. Tiny

white flakes are
falling, swirling, sticking
to your clothes. You

have not seen snow in
years, you won’t see snow
even now, you realize as
you watch and these
colorless specks

don’t melt. You
are not seeing snow, what
you smell is not
by chance. You squint, seeing
the ash settle

on the graveyard: the rows
of crooked markers, green
and overlapping
with age, like a giant’s
rotted teeth; your friends;
and their solemn faces. Maybe

this time it is wood
that they are burning, but you
cannot forget when
human beings were considered no better
than fuel.

Years later, and the smell
hanging inside the latrines,
the stench
that twists your instincts,
has not
gone away. One thousand
two hundred
people every morning in
these latrines
sitting on concrete blocks
with the
round holes, so filthy that even
the murderers
won’t walk in, and I have
just walked
in from a ceramic and porcelain
shrine to
cleanliness.

Why is hellopoetry.com black and white? I've always wondered about this... why my colorful photographs are required to travel back in time. How does this effect the poetry in any way, shape, or form? But I understand the wisdom of this design now. And it sets a great metaphor for all of the people of the pen involved in this truly noble motion, this secret society for people with passion, talent, and troubled minds and souls. Hello Poetry is black and white not because it has to be monochromatic and modern, but because us poets fill these pages with enough inovativeness and color already with our words, ideas, thoughts, songs, senryus, ballads, heartbreaks, insecurities, that adding literal color to this website would be overwhelming. These soft undertones of gray, black, and white may be considered drab and depressing to some, but to us poets it represents timelessness. And this is probably why we are all here. Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, or even yearly publishing poems. Because we all know we are not going to live forever, and we are so entirely insignificant in the broad scheme of things and of the universe itself, that it is a bit comforting and helpful to have this coping mechanism or soft blankie to calm our fears, that this literature we write, however insignificant it may be, is absolutley permanent. And that maybe someday it will be remembered so a small bit of us may live on. Tom Riddle knew the needs and wants of man kind before anybody else realized it. Maybe he was just trying to cope with the fact that he is insignificant. These poems are all our Horcruxes so *viveamus per camenam nostram.