the sedentary dead,
the virtuous dead,
have taken their rest upon the Fortunate Isle,
cutting their hair
and trimming their nails
as they eat out their substance
and scrape mold from their bones—
mirages of memory
conjured by tales
of an absent past.
the migrant dead,
the peripatetic dead,
the mendicant dead,
who waded the river’s galling current
only to be turned away at the verge,
told to go back
and die the right way,
standing in line
with a single shining obol on your tongue
to pay the ferryman.
You mined the silver
but never knew its taste;
you builded for the builders
and had no homes;
you thought for the thought leaders
whose snouts never poked the insides of a book
yet bought their passage
with pickings from your brains.
You can buy anything for an obol
as long as it’s a lie,
the evitable burden of remembrance,
the smirking luxury of virtue,
an empty epitaph carved upon a granite cloud.
You are all welcome here.
Let others who are good
remember and be remembered for their sins.
You have come here
among the hated and the houseless,
the criminal and stillborn—
nameless, every one of us!—
thirsting for the rains of Lethe.
It rains here all the time.
The lips of these your unmarked graves are parted
to swallow down the torrents
and quench you to your bones.
