There is something ineffable
about caressing cold stone.
There is a catharsis in being gentle to the dead,
In being the lone ghost on their only lasting physical memory.
To wade through the uncut hair of graves,
as though searching through the mist,
is an experience unlike any other.

The intimacy of life and death,
shared through hands on headstones,
is reassuring.
The half-afraid touch lets me think that one day,
I, too, will lie easily underneath the grass.

For when I am in the ground,
forgotten by the world,
I can rest in the earth, knowing,
that some lone, living being will speak with me again.
I will be pulled back onto life’s main stage
to dance and sing in an imagined heaven.

And I will never truly be dead,
Never be completely lost.

I will be etched into their palms,
forged into their tendons and their bones.
My unspoken name will be the calendar
with which they measure their own time,
and the remainder of their life.
They, too, will feel the coldness of the stone,
and laugh at the warmth that used to be my life.
They will feel it scorch up their throat like bile because…

…because they know it will be their turn soon enough.

As all things started as dust,
and change, transform, and die,
so too shall all things return.

Such is the cycle of the universe.