Scraps of evidence
Oh, the plans. The plans I had. Each of them scrawled on crumpled paper, folded and folded again for good measure and secrecy until they bulged with so much promise and barely repressed youthful vigour. Thoughtlessly stuffed in careworn pockets patched over sternums and alongside thighs, warm enough to sleep well — all too well — in oblivion.
I never let one go, never let a single scratched line wheedle its way from my vice-like grip. Loaded the barrel, then shot through every point with a finely aimed bullet. Straight into the temple. Clean and precise, merciless in the assassination. Murdered in its very moment of gestation, as blood pumped in ecstasy. From dead ink to dead skin to just so much dead sperm. Held in stasis, buried in ice and dust and fur.
No one can have you now. No one. No one excepted. Not even me. Even though I keep finding your tattered remains half-eaten in cotton corners. Chewed and spat out by so many starving moths, their eyes popping with slavering greed as they gorged on those feasts of words, shining ideals and crazed midnight notions until they reeled away, drunken to death with sickness and over-indulgence. Eat well then eaten better, consumed by flames. Snuffed out.
The mountain grows higher, day by day. I am trapped on landfill, yet all at sea, cut adrift in my own detritus. I have ceased caring about future generations, thinking only of my selfish, embittered self and the state of this yellowing frame in years to come. I’ll paper over the cracks, because it’s what we’re taught, and I have more paper than I could ever need; every word in existence could not sit squarely on these lines, filling out their endless length. I won’t look back, because my neck will break. I won’t dig down, because I’ll have forgotten where I buried the evidence.
I don’t plant flowers or fashion a cross. I don’t ask a passing angel to remember you in her prayers. There will be no eulogy chiselled in marble. I prefer to mourn at an unmarked grave.