Thing 8: My Deadpost

This week I'm starting a new theme for my create-a-thing-a-day project: Poems from Bed. I'm going to try to come up with the first line of a poem before I get out of bed in the morning and finish it before the end of the day. Here's the first one. My Dead Sometimes my dead get carried away. They wake me (inappropriately) in the night and appear in strange groupings never seen in life. My grandmother for instance would have never hung around with the kid who bullied me at Carson Park who hung himself in jail before he turned twenty-one but there you have it. My dead are never frightening. Is that strange? I think not. Ghosts either comfort or sadden the living. In spite of all the bad press, the dead only terrorize killers. The dead are indelible, parenthetical, implicit. The dead have all the time in the world for you now. My dead of course are not alive, I don't mean to confuse you, they are dead as doornails (a phrase that has always confused me for reasons I haven't time to explain). The dead are dead as dead can be but the past isn't dead as you well know by now. Your dead are more real to you than any of your possessions. That's not of course to say that you own your dead in fact they are a kind of communal property that you possess no more than the next dreamer. True figments demand that you share them. The dead are not cold, most of the dead, in my experience are in fact quite warm. They smell of split pea soup, peppermint candy, rhubarb pie, whiskey, marijuana, and after shave. The dead are mostly pleasant all in all. Sometimes my dead embrace me, and I hug them back. My dead are wagging a finger at me now, for I sleep too long and they understand the importance of the day in ways that I cannot. My dead remind me that one day like the dinosaurs I will decompose and become fuel that others will use for their transportation needs and to heat their cold living flesh. You only get one trip, one chance to burn.