Looking at Death, Looking at Me

They aren’t us.

I’ve reworked this calibration

Of disproportionate algorithms

One too many times,

Labored over a spilt cauldron

That was just a little too hot,

Invited misery in for a drink

Without giving lay for my wake

In due notice.

They don’t act like us,

These tears reminiscing

Over something that I don’t comprehend;

What is lost in the moment between

Life and death that leaves them

So fragile?

A funeral is not for the dead,

It has nothing to do with memory

Or holding their presence,

Dia de los muertos

Is not for the celebration of life

Once past and probably brought

Anew again,

These are days for the living.

Days where we die,

Or they I should say,

Letting that ounce of life slip

Into the ground with someone else’s

Body that the soul no longer

Remembers its owner.

Husbands weep over a wife

Who gave her first love to her father,

Whether he was there or not;

Wives give their breast to the earth

In remembrance of a man

Who did not hold her first,

Who remembers the name

Of the girl and not the woman;

Sons relinquish their strength

To their mother’s casket,

Suckling her one last time,

But offer strength

Brazen enough to cripple death

With a firm handshake

Against his father’s cold hands;

Daughters are far less transparent

But not quite opaque,

Couldn’t make the distinction

Between burying her mother

Or her best friend

Despite the long standing enemy she made,

Yet romanticizes the death of her father

Over a candlelight dinner

That some man might look like him in the approaching darkness

Or at least make hint to his glory.

These miscreants of misery aren’t like us:

They were coddled while we were scorned,

Played while we labored,

Did simple addition while I made conundrums of their existence.

It’s no wonder Death and I don’t break in each other’s wake,

He’s simply around too much,

Like a sibling you cast spite at on

A Saturday night…

I’ve had quite a many Saturday nights with him.

They are not like us because Death has found

A way to steal so much of them at once

By stealing another,

Yet He steals from us slowly

So these funerals

Are spectacles where the dead become the living.

… But you are yet not like me,

Those tears found your cheeks

In the moonlight of 4 in the morning.

I feel alone under the stars.