Here is what I want to tell people about the ghastly
the grim the macabre the morbid
the grinning skulls we draw on pages
at desks far from fields of skulls set rigid:

You cannot negotiate with silence.
You can only
look at it

however
you like.

There is no sanctity dead or living.
Though, for all of us, I would wish it so
(we never cease in making monuments to swear it is so)
(look at these monuments--
and see it is not).

A natural law requires no belief.

You don’t listen.
I said:
Let go.

When walking through a gravesite, you forget that several feet under lies the body of a person you may or may not know.

I have a surname and plot number...

This could have been my family.

Maybe it is.
Maybe it was.

I don't feel worthy enough to sit in the grass before the tombstones.

To place my hands on the stones... they're so cold.

I've read the inscriptions.

Never forgotten by wife and son.
Faithful unto death, may he rest in peace.
A soldier of the great war.
Known unto God

Known unto God

Known unto God.

I have a surname and a plot number written in roman numerals, somebody tell me where I can find the plot under the number 30.

I ran through the gravesite only to find 29.

And I ran out of time.

So tell me where I can find him.

After all... an unknown family wrapped in a common surname is all I really know.

I met a man who claimed him and I came from the same home,
I told him I've never been.

he didn't understand my disconnected nostalgia,
Instead he trusted place and time.
I guess he hasn't had much experience with drafty windows or closed mouths.

I tried to explain to him, home is where you hide your skeletons,
and I've used people and words as closet doors,
when that didn't work I buried them in shallow graves under my skin.

he said he noticed the bones sticking out of my body and I told him,
my search for home as left me starving and unstable,

that after a lifetime of asking for directions
to churches and cemeteries,
I've become envious of comfortable beds and worn-in floor boards.

9.29.16 ©
I sit in cemeteries to center myself.
Filling my lungs with oxygen
While my friends lay under the earth.

What was the world like the last day they knew it?
Before it became their final resting place?
Is there anyone left to remember them?

I sit and lie and fantasize about
The incredible lives they must have lived.
Reality is most were no more than ordinary.

But to me, they bring comfort.
In an odd sort of way complex in its existence
What do they have to fear? Their lives are done.

But mine is not; not yet.
I have blood in my veins and life in my being.
What I do with these days is up to me.

I come here to remember
The lives before mine
As well as the fact that I still have mine to live.

And that is a gift
Even when it feels like a curse.
I have something in me these never get again.

The birds still sing.
The breeze still plays with the trees.
I breathe deeply.

The dead remind me why I'm alive.

I used to hate cemeteries.
I hate the way it reminds me of my memories.
It reminds me how I lost someone and never had the chance to say goodbye.
Telling me I could no longer see him again no matter how much I cry.
It makes me regret of things that should have been and what ifs.
But when I visit you today for the first time, I was relieved that at least there was a place like this.
Where it can prove to me that you were once real.
That you really happened to me.
Your name engraved on the stone makes me remember that once in my life, someone like you existed and loved me.
I realized the true purpose of cemeteries- *to remember.

I don't think that people go to cemeteries
to pay their respects
I think they go
because they need to pretend
that
body is sleeping, only resting
6 feet under
I think that they need the grass to hold on to
So they feel they're not falling
off the Earth
They need to lay the flowers down,
as an apology
"I'm sorry
I have to forget about you."

You’re all skeletons and veins
(or something like that)
Just a pile of bones hanging on an empty frame
With walls that feel too close for comfort
(You romanticize the dark as she sings your name)
I want the moon to light up your bed
And your flesh as we wait for the dark
We’re counting empty minutes so we can feel our ribs as they sink
Finding empty beds of flowers and empty bottles and empty seats
Stones carved in cemeteries with graves emblazoned with no names
Skeletons and souls, we are hanging hearts on empty frames