In Remembrance

I spend my days among the dead.

Stone tables for ceremonies,

steel knives for whispers.

Men, women, children,

split open like ripe pomegranates,

their flesh curling back in sheets,

ribs collapsing like scaffolds

from temples abandoned by gods who forgot their names.

Organs gleam like counterfeit treasures,

worthless coins for dead gods long forgotten,

blood clots into hieroglyphs across the floor,

each stain a language only silence reads,

each drip a punctuation mark

in a scripture no one will ever decipher.

The dead are merciful.

They do not scream when I unhouse their hearts,

do not recoil when I sever their secrets.

They offer endings in clean cuts,

like lips sewed shut,

like pages torn from a book the world will never read.

But home is not as kind.

There, my wife

once a woman, once a mirror to my marrow, 

moves like a vessel hollowed of spirit,

a ghost performing a life she no longer owns.

Her eyes are fogged lanterns,

flickering with storms no prophet dares name.

She calls me by strangers’ names,

by gods I do not recognize,

sometimes by no name at all,

and each syllable drives a wedge

deeper into the spine of our shared past.

Fifteen years of vows hang between us

like chains rusted onto bone,

like tombstones marking a grave

we have already begun digging ourselves.

Love is a relic buried under moss. 

To abandon her is treason;

to remain is to rot beside her.

I envy the cadavers.

At least they find closure.

They end.

I endure.

Each night, I walk the corridor of two abysses:

from morgue to home,

from corpses that lie still

to the one that still breathes.

I see her reflection in every shadow,

hear her whisper in every gust of air,

taste her absence in every meal.

The living, I have learned,

can haunt far more efficiently than the dead.

And every night, the truth pierces sharper,

carved deeper than any scalpel could reach.

Death is not the horror.

Decay is not the horror.

The horror is the corpse

that keeps breathing,

that remembers love as obligation,

that drags the living into graves

no stone, no prayer, no history can mark.

The world does not stop.

It does not pause for grief,

does not kneel at pain.

It watches, patient, indifferent,

while we stumble.

And I walk among it all;

the corpses, the living, the ruined, the hollow

and understand, at last,

some horrors never die.

They simply learn to breathe in a stranger manner every sunrise.