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i think that:
i am a graveyard
of all the people who came before me,
of all the bones that made me and all the ghosts i carry with me

“we are all the bones of those who made us”, but what if you’re an open mass grave?

there are too many ghosts that haunt me, too many
creaks in the floorboards and shifting eyes in the portraits
the carbon monoxide alarms never work no matter how many batteries you replace

no matter how much soil you throw on the casket, the bodies are never buried

is it a common quality, for one person to be
an entire graveyard, filled with euologies
and dead flowers, and epitaphs committed to memory?

every headstone i’ve memorialized is simultaniously something i wish to smash to dust and something i couldn’t fundamentally get rid of.

tell me something, if you opened the casket: are the bones in the box?
if the graveyard is robbed,
left with nothing but soil and particle board,
what would that leave it if not devoid of the very things giving it an identity, a history?

there is too many rotting corpses under
the floorboards,
too many bloodstains in the carpets
too many skeletons in the closet picked clean.

oh, death, i was never a boy to build coffins and yet circumstance has made a carpenter out of me.

how many ghosts will i have to lead across the styx,
drink from the lethe
until i find some semblance of peace?