No satined-ceiling basement room for me.

Let my flesh be cleanly burned away,

my bones returned to dust and ash.

Swept from the retort, ground fine,

shards of bone released from recognition.

 

My artificial joints mourn magnetic removal.

After all, they stepped in when movement

was too painful for my body to bear.

Though sinew, bone, muscle were never comfortable

with their medical insertion for failed organic bone.

 

As energy and matter merge in life, let my body

merge in death with water and the shore.

I’ll settle down three generations deep.

Scatter a bit at water edge, the rest kayak out

to deeper sea. Scatter some secretly

on my father’s grave. I’ll keep him company.

 

Keep a bit if you wish, just as I did long ago.

They’re in an Island Spice jar wrapped in purple paper.

It took 2 years to retrieve them from the mortuary.

It seems shameful to have left them for so long

but it takes the time it takes to gather and to grieve.

 

I still have that little Momma jar.

Look for it when I’m gone.

It’s the spice of her life that lingers still.

Add her spice to my ashes to scatter in the deep,

a pinch with mine to join my father,

memory of a happy time trapped in a photograph.

 

Not much more than a pinch, I think.

Their happy time was brief, not held in memory.

Never-the-less, we all remain connected

in some fragmented way.