What is a eulogy?
A confession of memory--
An avoidance of the singular truth.
I'm whispering to ghosts with no ears like they do on Sundays, in stuffy confession booths.
Eulogies are for the living,
The ones he left behind--
For his mother and father and two older brothers,
and truths to answers that they'll never find.
Eulogies are for the living but he's taken me with him.

I work in a hospital,
sterile, too bright, monitors beep,
everything's bleak except you.
I know you're dying and as I check your vital signs I try not to speak.
You tell me once you're better you'll take me to dinner,
I wish I was optimistic, I wish I didn't know better.
So instead I take my breaks in your room,
we sit there and talk over ****** hospital food.
When I work night shifts I watch your mother cry while you sleep,
It's eight o-clock, she hasn't had dinner, I remind her to eat.

On the fourth floor of the brick wall barricade,
We stood at the window watching the rain,
I felt calm watching water drop suicide;
I thought how it'd be nice to die by your side.
My mind breached every professional boundary,
but my mouth remained closed,
looking back it was obvious-- they should've let me go.

I stayed with you on the worst days,
when you couldn't pick your head up from the bed.
Instead of encouraging movement and intervention,
I just sat there, right or wrong, and tried to follow what you said.

I remember when the chemo failed,
your family asked the doctors "isn't there something you can do?"
they turned to me, like I was guilty,
and said "no, you're wrong, this can't be true".
"palliative care" "hospice" "comfortable" euphemisms fell from my mouth,
they tasted bitter like acid and lies--
I wanted to scream and cry and tear my heart out.

At night I lay in an empty bed,
and when I sleep I dream,
I wake up next to a body bag,
my mouth too terrified to scream.

At your death I was a ghost,
lying next to your body, I tried not to choke.
The suffocation of words I didn't say left me tired and broke.
I wanted to lay in the morgue and
f
  a
    l
      l
asleep with you there,
next to your blue glass eyes and brown curly hair.

The parting gift you left for me-- a dialogue in my head,
your ghost screams at me at night, I’m never alone in my bed.
A chorus of morphine alarms and IV drips silence me; and they sing my songs for you instead.

This was the fourth time I'd heard the crack of death;
In my experience, when someone dies you can hear this pop or crack sound.
This was the fourth time I heard the pop of death, life escaping from a body.
But this time it was different because that crack came from inside me;
It was the snap that severed me from the universe.

The only thing I will say about absolute-lies is that you must be absolutely willing to give up what you believe absolutely.

I'm scared that 'becoming' who I am is just an acceptance of realities others have created. Maybe the older we get the more entrenched we become in what we perceive to be the truth; the more we experience of our tiny existence, the more we believe in it.
"The way of life we live, a life we have never really chosen, forces us to walk past what we see."

Abortion access and rights are being slashed and women’s voices silenced by forced pregnancy and poverty..
So when I got my period this month I felt the need to celebrate.
I don’t have to grow a life to participate in an existence I myself can’t justify.
I won’t have to raise a daughter as an incubator for a state of lies.

I watch the sun come up; this is the third morning in a row.
Darkness, darkness, darkness then suddenly light.
Light sweeps over hills and reaching golden rays intrude even the darkest of corners-- this is the bravery of the sun.

I've got a list of things I have to pay and a list of people I owe and favours I'll never be able to repay.
I can't feel love or happiness or pain I just watch everything happening and it's so tragic because amidst our progress  nothing has ever really changed.

Don’t trust anything around you.
Everything is a lie.
Can’t even trust my own thoughts or your thoughts or what you say but I’ll consider it all.
We’re a consideration generation with no truth.

I am a global citizen, a temporary resident of this earth,
I barely exist but I refuse to be anything less.
I refuse to bury my head in the sand behind borders.
Borders are just ideas, right?
Ideas that compartmentalize people and places,
It's easier to be apathetic to foreign faces.
It's easier to be controlled and lulled into the hamster wheel that keeps the world going round in the right direction for those with the money.
As long as we run and don't ask questions the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor.
But the worlds' pain is my pain, and their pain is your pain-- wake up.
Children are dying in horrific ways, people are suffering, and the real irony of it all is that it doesn't have to be this way.
While I'm writing this, the old boys politician clubs of our "democratic" countries are smoking cigars, driving foreign cars and talking about the weather.

"Be the change you wish to see in the world"...
But I was born upside down
and instead I am all the things I know I need to change,
but don't.

Don't leave me alone with my thoughts,
they're eating me, tormenting me, they're at the centre of every battle I've fought.
Don't leave me alone with my family,
they're living out their dreams through me and I'm so scared to let them down.
Don't leave me alone, don't let me go, don't let me drown.

I look down the neck of a bottle into the empty belly;
My head whispers, stirring my conscious, "I will only **** you",
These are words of comfort.
Guns **** humans.
Hatred kills humans.
Greed kills humans.
Corrupt governments and politicians **** humans.
Consuming alcohol kills me.
I stagger to my dimly lit refrigerator,
I retrieve another bottle of poison and think;
"worst case scenario: this will only **** me"

We are all falling into chaos;
our houses of cards are crashing.
If we could zoom out time like you can a camera lens,
we could see the spectrum for what it is and maybe we could truly witness universal entropy increasing-- it's always increasing.
We would be witnesses to the truth of dust, the truth of chaos.
We could be seers of time and space and float above everything, escaped from the race.
Instead I can only witness my small blip of time from own my small perspective.
I will watch politicians and global warming and the world run around in circles and I will call this chaos.

The summer sky was slashed across our backdrop,
and the bleeding sun beginning to fade,
we counted out the hours, minutes and the seconds,
wishing all the moments we lost could've stayed.
And in that moment I loved you,
I loved you so sure and deep,
and in our temporary lives, on this temporary earth, this temporary moment made it all seem...
worth it.

The truth will never set you free.
It doesn't even exist-- it's just based on each person's own view of reality.
So instead of the truth I search for love.
It was the only thing that ever made any sense to me.

I watched a man die today.
It happened at the breakfast table;
he slumped over in his chair and started to convulse.
His lips turned white and I helped him from the chair to the floor.
He gasped for air and I grabbed his hand.
His chart clearly stated "DO NOT RESUSCITATE", so I didn't.
I kept calling his name, as if recognition of his existence would ward off death. It didn't.
Helpless, I sat there on the kitchen floor, with a man I took care of but didn't really know.
It was like trying to preform vitals on a mannequin. No pulse. No respirations.  No blood pressure. No air.
I pronounced his time of death "11:12h",
I told someone they should probably write that down.
I had never seen death before, not even at a funeral.
They made me clean his stiff body and we carried him from the kitchen to his room.
Now I understand the saying "dead weight".
I kept his jaw closed so the undertakers wouldn't have to break it.
They call this "rigor mortis", when the body stiffens.
Then everyone looked to me for guidance "you have an education, right? You know what to do."
They don't teach you this in school.
The undertakers came and hoisted him into the body bag.
Why did they take him like that? Cleanly zipped the black bag of doom from bottom to top.
There, ladies and gentlemen, was the grand finale of ninety-three years of existence.
I wasn't ready for him to leave.
How will he breathe? Wait-- right. Dead people don't breathe.
I wasn't ready for him to be dead.
They should've come later.
How do I move on from this? From something so absolute?
Maybe I should've chosen a different career.

Sometimes I want to float out my bedroom window;
Past the unkept yellow bungalow,
Past the fir trees and the winter carcasses of rose bushes,
Past all the street lamps and their glow.
It's time to go.
I feel tired and torn and the soles of my shoes are worn.

I'm screaming,
But my voice is trapped in glass jars you've saved on the kitchen shelf of our small country house,
and you listen only when I'm gone,
and only when you miss me,
Because I'm better seen and not heard,
Who wants the truth when the face that tells you it is pretty?
Distraction is better than facing reality.

All the words in my head bubble to the surface,
thick black goop, a mess of words of no real use,
they just hover, linger and ooze.
Cold night, fist fight, darker shades of blue,
Closed doors, corridors, I don't live here anymore.
A house of stone and words of glass we throw to waste our time,
Monday news, funeral shoes, let's do another line.
She won't come back, heart attack at the age of forty-nine,
Cross-dressers, gloomy weather, valentine be mine.
Closed doors, corridors, I think I've lost my mind.
Closed doors, corridors, I don't live here anymore.

I am God of the fishbowl,
Every reality past these water blurred walls doesn't concern me.
In my fishbowl I am heard,
I matter,
I make a difference,
There is a God,
There is a God,
There is a God,
I know because as I swim closer to the glass I see his face reflected back at me.

I don’t really understand god,
But the god everyone speaks of must be biology and exist somewhere in the cycle of all life—
in birth and death, joy and suffering.
Everything inevitable and unpredictable.

I'm the thief of your dreams; I've gone and turned them all black.
Everything you wanted for me, everything you hoped I'd be I threw back.
Now you worry and smother me with all of your good intentions,
But I lie to you through my teeth-- even my "truths" are inventions.

There is evidence of gravity here,
it pushed me, against earth and ground and concrete.
I am living,
I am free,
within confines of society.
There is a blank space in my head of deep secrets,
darkest when I think of them;
beautiful.
I ****** him for money.
I'm a *****.
I am temporary.
I do not exist.
I'm wet when he ***** me.
That must mean I like it.
I zone out, I ******* like it. Give it to me. I'm ******* dripping wet.
Use me. Use me. Use me.
I'm psychotic.
I have images in my head, I am divine, I am God, I am empty, so empty.
I will **** myself.
Not because I'm sad, but because everyone who knows me knows I don't belong here.
I make a better memory than friend.

This is the kind of happiness that comes in waves.
Water fills coves and beach shores but just as quickly as the waves were given, they're taken away.
The tide is at its peak and I prepare myself for the emptiness I'm going to feel when it leaves.

He doesn’t talk much about where he came from;
maybe he’s scared the truth of the place would speak more than he could.
Maybe it’s hard to explain the hunger or the times the power goes off or the constant fear to someone who’s flown above it all.
Though we don’t talk about the sand or the fruit on the trees or what the rain feels like at the end of the day either.
We’ve lived moment to moment and learned what we know of each other through the present.
Somehow I yearn for this place I’ve gathered pieces of. The place I cannot know but that grew inside me.

At work I disguise hospital beds for home,
But everyone can feel the stark truth--
It hangs in the air,
"You'll die here",
And I can provide no answers or words of comfort to ward off fear.

I stare at the LED screen, it's been a few hours.
I can start to feel that hum of the light and vibrations of thoughts behind my eyes, telltale signs of not blinking for too long.

I sit slouched on my bed, bent over my laptop immersed in another world-- one of ideas and electrical signals.

50 year old me will look back on these days, I'll probably regret my poor posture, poor diet and bulimic tendencies.

I am a product of my generation, addicted to any escape mechanism to which I can cling, God knows there's tons of viable outlets.

I can talk to strangers online and pretend I'm important. I can play games like living another life, I can do drugs, have lots of *** and immerse myself in the complications of relationships.  I can develop an eating disorder and immerse myself in the depths of that nightmare; anything to avoid the even bigger nightmare which is life, which is truth.

I choose not to wake up.
world of war craft-- not wars and bombings in far away countries.
Strangers online--not my ****** up family problems.
Celebrity Instagram-- not politicians and corruption.
Selfies-- not self worth.
I choose not to wake up.

If a virus kept its host alive it too could live.
But greed is more powerful.
Maybe we’re the same.

Over and over like an endless love story we are pulled back together.
No matter where we go,
No matter all we've done,
You are the fibres of my existence-- and I will always come back to you.

I had a dream I killed you.
Cold blooded blood on my hands.
Heat swells and expands,
The space I held for patience was small to begin with,
And in my dreams it explodes.
I watch everything explode.
The only thing I feel is relief; love was a myth and I’m tired of the grief.

You like me better when I'm high,
I like you best when you lie;
I guess that's why we're friends.

I tried to reach out to someone about depression.
About how I want to die.
He talked about his life--
Then we had ***.

I can feel the chemicals ***** under my skin,
I can feel the sunshine pouring in.
Another day another dollar,
another distraction to silence the callers;
All those people who want to know where I've been, or all those who genuinely ask how I've been.
I've avoided these truths at all cost,
If I never look back I'll never have to face what I lost.

For me to be alive I must eat.
For me to eat, things have to die,
And for what?--
An existence I can't even justify.

My dad is so proud because I'm going to university,
My mom sees hope,
And my sister looks up to me.

I'll become a doctor,
and my mom will tell her friends,
I'll have kids and a husband and take antidepressants.

I want to die so bad sometimes but I'll never take that leap.
My life is a promise to them I've still got to keep.

I remember the stillness of that night;
and the silence we felt because nature doesn’t really count as sound.
I remember the cat-tails we’d dip in kerosene
and watch the glean of the light that rode the coat tails of summer into fall.
I hear a clock deep inside me that counts the seasons I’ve watched; tic tock tic tock
Someday this is going to stop.
It threatens to stop.

Remember us.
We built monuments in our name,
and cities to accommodate our existence.
Remember us.
Concrete, steel, pavement.
We were here.
We destroyed life and slashed our names across the globe.
When there's no one left to remember us,
The wind will whistle through the empty streets,
the hollow concrete buildings will crumble,
but we always had a lurking suspicion that our monuments were empty--our existence subtle.
Remember Us.

I had a happy childhood,
it exists in my mind as the salty seaweed smell of the ocean and my mother's sun kissed garden.
My mom planted tomatoes and black eyed susans in her garden,
and her infinite love for my sister and I was reflected in everything she touched.
Everything she does is a labour of love (will I ever be like that?);
Her love is a labour so strong it turned me into a prism, giving me the ability to love the world,
shining through me and the things I touch and now,
I have a garden where I grow tomatoes.

If you wonder about truth you realize a singular thing doesn’t have one truth but many, from many different angles reflected in a million mirrors.

I don't want to feel ok,
Ok is a lie when I see wars on tv and I just watched children die.
Please don't be ok,
Please don't let this be ok.  
Don't let a false sense of security become an excuse for apathy.

I want to live my life effortfully.
I want to expend my energy while I have it and chase things that are meaningful if only to anyone but myself.
I want to feel in my bones that I am god. My own personal god. The voice I hear in my head, I want to know without a doubt her power.

Globally, the number one killer of children is diarrhea.
Usually, this can be prevented by drugs that cost fifty cents.
But I needed that new car,
I deserve designer jeans,
I have to look good this season,
Because life means nothing compared to things.

I reject your food,
I reject your greed,
This is a protest.
This is the only thing with which I can make a point.
And when they ask my why I'll ask them "why not"?
I'll ask them why they allow this culture, this society, these warped values and ******* to infect them.
Why are we so apathetic?
How can we stand to be alive?

I'll meet you in Paris and we'll talk about the weather.
It's just small talk though-- something to fill the silence,
you'd think we'd know better.

I tried to tell the truth but they smothered me,
No one wants the truth-- no one wants that responsibility.

I am the swollen belly of a snake,
Filled up with 150 different flavours of ice cream, 100% fat, 100% diabetes. Give me more.
I am the swollen belly of a snake,
All night drive-thrus, the Golden Arches of heart disease.
Give me more.
I am the swollen belly of a snake,
Super sized, double order of fries, any kind, anytime.
Give me more.
I am the swollen belly of a snake,
Gobbling up commercials selling the same **** a million different ways.
Give me more.
I am the swollen belly of a snake,
absorbing political excrement like a big fat chocolate candy bar.
Give me more.
I am the swollen belly of a snake,
Gobbling up fear and propaganda, I slurp up lies, and wash it all down with a big ******* to a blatant reality staring me square in the face. I assume ignorance and deny responsibility. Give me more.
I am the swollen belly of a snake, bursting, spewing ***** over cities, because we knew deep down  it couldn't last.
They filled me up so full I vomited violently until there was nothing left.
I am the empty belly of a snake and I am hungry.