#cemeteries
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.
Sep 5, 2018
Sep 5, 2018 at 2:53 AM UTC
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.
Apr 23, 2017
Apr 23, 2017 at 8:49 PM UTC
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.
Mar 18, 2017
Mar 18, 2017 at 1:19 PM UTC
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.
Sep 29, 2016
Sep 29, 2016 at 1:39 PM UTC
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.
Aug 21, 2016
Aug 21, 2016 at 1:48 AM UTC
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."
Mar 21, 2016
Mar 21, 2016 at 9:18 PM UTC
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
May 24, 2015
May 24, 2015 at 7:10 PM UTC
i dream of silk and black lipstick, leather and ice-burn
i fashion thoughts into clouds of smoke i ghost out of my mouth
into necklaces i will only ever give to you; you
are burnt russet bitten lip bleached bone coalesced into
constellation; you burn brighter
than any constellation i have ever breathed
i dream of your hipbones; stretch marks flicking over them
like lightning glimpsed between fingers; like wishbones silently pulled apart
in promise; you are wishbone you are gold plate you are sunshine
through a stained-glass window; my heart is glass
a cemetery to your footprints a cathedral to your broken
dreams; i can taste the honey in your scattered thoughts
like a prayer on my tongue
i dream of deep purple and yellow and green and
black and fading bruise and blood
at the corner of your lip; i can taste iron in your breath
rotting in my dreams slow-burning ice in my veins; vengeance
is a dish best served cold i know
that if i unfurl my skeleton and tuck you into the spaces between my
ribcage and my lungs you will taste just as sweet
i dream of ruby emerald sapphire in brooches pinned onto black i
think of the bruise-giver of the blood-spiller of cracks in my
ribcage of wishbones of constellations of iron-taste of ice-burn of you of you of you
and i let you in
and i am cathedral i am cemetery i am bonfire i am in l o v e
with constellation
May 5, 2015
May 5, 2015 at 10:30 AM UTC