DAMNATIO MEMORIAE

Living people write

poems in the voices of the dead;

they give words of the living

for the dead to perform,

and among the dead

they place themselves,

like in death they would exist

and have the gift of speech still.

These puppets from their graves raised
speak of how no sorrow

should be felt, how good

were their lives, and

how those passing their tombs

should read the words and remember

them. The old Roman

magic of those not forgotten

still surviving.

They write, the living

with their beating hearts

and brains like oceans of thought,

their veins with full of red blood

swiftly coursing; they write

and see death but life

slower flowing, a lucid dream

with moments of wakefullness interrupted.

A long rest, that good dream of Socrates.

They delude themselves

and those who read their verses;

they comfort themselves

and those readers with lies,

as the truth hurts and devours

all hope and leaves an abyss:

For death is but annihilation, oblivion

of all thought and consciousness;

more escape the grip of the event horizon

of a black hole than escapes the maw of death.

The dead have been erased from the universe.

This is death: Damnatio memoriae.

04.01.2018