if I die,
it won’t be with roses pressed against my chest
or candlelight flickering
like some poet’s dream of a clean, quiet ending.
no—if I die,
it’ll be on a Thursday when the trash hasn’t been taken out,
the rent’s due,
and the world just keeps dragging its feet
through dust and noise.

will you write about me then?
will you scrawl my name in the margins of your mornings,
squeeze me into the spaces between your coffee and silence?
or will I vanish,
like the half-smoked cigarettes we used to leave
burning in old ashtrays,
forgotten until it was too late?

I don’t want the pretty lies,
no poetry about sunsets or fate.
just say I was here—
say I burned bright,
not with brilliance,
but with the stubborn flame of a bad idea
that refused to die.

say I laughed too loud in empty rooms
and drank too much in crowded ones.
say I cursed at the world
and loved it anyway
in the same breath.

there’s a kind of beauty in not being remembered
by statues or verses.
I never wanted to be carved in stone,
only in the raw pulp of memory—
messy, torn,
something you’ll think of
only when you hear a certain song
or smell cheap whiskey in the air.

if I die,
don’t put flowers on my grave.
put words on a page,
put stories in the air,
put that wild, laughing thing I was
back into the world,
if only for a moment.

but if you can’t,
if life gets too full of its own noise,
I’ll understand.
because dying is simple;
it’s the living that gets complicated.