I remember you asking me why we care

 so deeply about where people are buried

 “They’re just bodies after all”.

Let us erect a marble plaque to remind us that 

our beloveds are no longer with us, and that there are 

strangers clutching our hands with syrupy smiles 

plastered upon their faces and dull echoes 

of consolation dripping from their tongues. 

Do not remember me by my skin and cracking bones but 

instead our midnight talks and how you can feel 

warmth by speaking my name. Do not stand

by my grave and weep, do not visit it

in a spell of loneliness, do not speak to 

a rotting corpse. 

Do not trap me in a cold wooden casket under 

shovel after shovel of mournful earth. Burn me

and scatter my ashes from the peak of a snow-capped 

mountain. Smile as pieces of me are ripped away from your 

open palms, no longer cruelly contained in a temporary 

urn. “You always did want to fly” you can whisper 

as you watch the gray dust that is me but not really 

twist away into the picturesque sky. 

That can be your farewell, a teary one-sided exchange, 

and you will no longer be rooted by a bundle of bones beneath a

marble plaque proclaiming my eternal peace. 

Do not memorialize my empty body, I am no longer there

to fill it. Do not pray to a God long departed, cracked palms

clasped like pointed steeples and wordless, trembling lips 

sodden with undeserved praise. Do not kid yourself into thinking my 

remains are any part of who I was, after all they were left 

behind when I departed; expendable and useless. Remember 

 fondly the tender bond we shared and how we could finish

each other’s sentences. Do not forget our comfortable silences 

brimming with warmth and amity. 

Dredge up past memories, and reminisce in why 

you are bothering to remember me at all.