Child,

do not tell me of the dead.

I have mourned the ghosts of the living,

I watched bones turn black before they were even sold to the lonley,

and we both know they see in color,

they feed in color.

I talk to this ghost sometimes child,

I can't help but talk back to memories.

I talk to him.

I ask him how he or I can be satisfied with monochormatic enemies.

Child,

he speaks in script to me,

bleeding red ink.

I try but I will never know what he thinks.

I've seen his hands child,

the ghost.

He writes poems,

makes my heart remember

what a deflated eraser feels like,

I ask him if he could write me another one.

Child listen,

I've taken his veins and made a barbed wire blanket to sleep on,

so that I will remeber what nightmares feel up against my flesh.

I have lived off of no hope,

a canvas that will never feel touch.

It smells like peppermint days, goat milk soap and fresh linen.

When love left it was refreshing, it was cleansing, it was comfortable.

When he died it was familar.

Emotion will teach you how to smell again,

vipers will excerise how to bite from you,

fight from you,

bite a head or two.

Big spaces will not promise love you.

Now child,

death is not spicey or sweet,

death is not a poem or language,

it is no mystery.

Death can not be hidden from air,

or cooked in one of my recipes.

Death is utterly foolish.

It makes music that the deaf hear and the mutes speak of.

Child,

when you learn to speak to ghosts,

I will tell you that you are in love.

That will be the day you tell me of the dead.