This is not a eulogy. (2011)

I will not shower him with praise, but I will bury him, not because he deserves ritual but because the earth should have him instead, I think. He should be swallowed and the meat sucked from his bones by the serrated teeth of time and decay and his skeleton should be left lonely until the soil claims it, too, and it exists as nothing more than a memory.

And as I bury him, I bury my darker self, that frightful twin which he had bred and nurtured from the very first – the cold other half of me that’s clawed at the hedges of my conscious self for as long as I have let it, and I have let it for far too long. I do not blame him for that; only we can face our demons and I was too weak, I could not hold them back. I should have been stronger, and I suppose it is in that weakness which I find my guilt.

That coffin holds not merely a corpse, but every jagged fragment of every heart broken in the wake of its life, now burrowing into its dead, dead skin like worms or maggots, starving vultures each and all similarly anxious for a slab of decadent retribution.