Dead Once. Buried Twice.

Goodness and greatness are but

buds of a night jasmine

that bloom in the chilling air of autopsy rooms,

beneath the flicker of dysfunctional neon lights;

never quite as much

in the changing seasons

of an oxygenated existence.

Perhaps some things need the smell of death

before people finally notice they were alive.

Spare me the circus.

I have a rather lengthy journey to oblivion.

Don't pretend to cry.

This isn't a funeral.

Funerals are reserved for people who were loved 

or liked at the least,

before their stories could be harvested

and rewritten by those who mistook surviving for having the right to write.

Would it befit a protagonist

to author the obituary of an anticlimax

that met its ending exactly on schedule?

No.

Say what you always wanted to say.

Say I deserved it.

Say it should have happened sooner.

Perhaps it will help cover

the blisters on the tender skin

of your shrunken anuses,

caused by years of sitting

on the throne of your rented moralities.

You are all storytellers.

Sacred in faith.

Righteous in truth.

And I was merely

the hiccuping epiglottis

choking the vocal cords

of your carefully rehearsed tales.

A minor inconvenience

between the lie

and its performance.

So let the story remain.

Let it sink.

Why clean a biography

you spent years writing

with neatly drained ink

from neatly manufactured lies?

Don't let death guilt you

into granting me posthumous glory.

You have a reptilian honour to preserve.

Don't contaminate it with the inconvenient interference of a mammalian frontal cortex.

Think of me exactly as you always intended.

It is easier.

Stories survive longer

when nobody checks whether they were ever true.

As for me,

I shall take your leave.

Keep your stories. Keep your sermons.

Keep your immaculate versions of what happened.

I'll keep the only thing you could never redact; the corpse.