in memoriam (final copy)

lyrics (in italics) curtesy of Mike Johnston.

My mind's a graveyard, 
I will bury you.
Burn you from my memory,
Ash like your last cigarette.

You are the only person, that does not feel your death date hanging heavy on your shoulders.
A heart as hard as tombstones, you do not realize you are digging your own grave.
Your chest cavity is as empty as your casket, waiting to be filled.
Daddy,
your eyes are a cemetery.
I get frightened like ghosts when I see myself in them,
a mirror image- we have the same irises.  They are brown like dirt.

When I see you now, you are slouching.
Your skin is hanging from your skull like bodies from their nooses.
You are hardly thirty six, and your face, it looks like compost.
You wear this addiction like a winding sheet,
rest so easy in it- like it's your coffin.

Not a corpse quite yet, I see a cadaver in you.
I see a carcass in the back of your throat, in your rare, haunting moments of laughter.
We all wonder-
Just how bad a sickness has become,
When a father is everything he tells his daughter to stay away from.
When he laughs at the accusation like it's some kind of joke.
Well, I think it's funny
that any chance of my childhood is buried 72 inches beneath your feet.
I wonder-
does it feel the vibrations when you slap your knees?
You are not a comedian.
You are a human scarecrow-
and your smile is decomposing.

This is the reality:
you will lay in a shallow grave.
You will rot at an average rate.
Maggots devouring your eyes, earthworms building a home out of your insides.
And when the last person who knows your name, exhumes your skeleton,
The bones will be empty, like that of a birds.
They will fill them with the memory of you.
And this- this will be the emptiest fullness anyone has ever felt:
Being haunted by your own self.

Everytime you look in the mirror
you wonder, for a brief moment, how you will die.
Old age.  Cancer.  Natural disaster.
We all know the answer, but we're too afraid of the truth.
You are killing yourself.
A suicide of magic, disappearing in a cloud of smoke.
You leave no nicotene scented legacy.
As a daughter, I am the only thing you have to leave behind,
and you did that a long time back.
You aren't even dead yet, and you are already haunting me with your absence.

My mind's a graveyard,
I will bury you.
Burn you from my memory,
Ash like your last cigarette.

So when you finally stop breathing,
and the smog that covers your entire city lightens a lot more than one would think.
When the autopsy comes back,
when it says there were holes in your lungs, brain, and beneath your ribs.
When you are cremated,
remains of a body that was one part animal, one part ashtray.

I will be the one, Daddy,
who packs all of your belongings,
as if to make you leave,
a second time.