When your flesh turns to dust,
and you become nothing more than cigarette ash
scattered on Atlantic breezes, they will decide
how human you were while you breathed.
On your tombstone, they will etch the essentials,
and summarise your million heartbeats in hastily carved letters,
by an impatient man. Each slab of silent sandstone
only reminds him of his ever fading mortality.

Each heartbreak, and each smile
contained within a single photo.
You have been reduced to a captured memory.
You have become nothing more than a collection of dates.
They will not remember you—they will simply remember
the moon's beauty as you said your goodbyes,
the corrupt idea that burned away the very life that
everything counted on.
You announced your presence, screaming ****** murders
that you were one day to commit.

When they embalm you with salts and pure white rags,
when they trap you forevermore, to sleep silently within
a cruel, confined coffin, they will speak dramatic eulogies in hushed voices,
standing over your grave-to-be.
Quietly, they will remember you,
as if frightened that they will wake the dead with their muffled,
forced tears. And as they lower you into the ground,
will your mother cry?

With aching arms,
the once happy,
will seal the grave with a kiss and a headstone,
and there will be no epitaph.

Your humanity reduced
to sandstone, dates,
and a name that will cease to mean anything
Except to the moon, except to the stars,
except to the lonely dead