“I rode on your back / until your knees broke and now / one mile left, I must toss you” – Victoria Chang, Little Soul

“There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.” – Hamlet

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I have been mad. Have you?

My grandmother is dying. I have the privilege of being a caregiver to her.

Have you ever watched a body decay with the wearer inside?

You don’t stay the person you were.

Death of every kind shoehorns something fundamental into our consciences. The metal on the heel, however? The demise of Greece’s mightiest. I? A mouse.

If your recognition of that animal is of a drawing, you have been conditioned. If your recollection of another human is ugly, you have been lied to. If your response to skin is bite, you must stop. Tip your compass on its ides for a moment, the alchemy is off.

It is an honor and a rite, guaranteed us by our birth, to love the dying, the dead. The blow of a hot iron mallet, it is, but so much more the blessing.

But what world is our state than the tax collector of blessings, the grindstone for the ones outcast from garden? Are we given choice, or is choice the price? If choice is but the choice alone, are any of us free?

Let me grieve. Good gods, if any, let me grieve.

The rest I need is coming. Rites be returned to the trampled, that death be sweet return from whence we dance, and grave be a hairbrush and a bird away from waking sleep.

A people deserve their elders. A person may not yet choose to live. A white ship hoists banners red as death and beckons us, “Aboard, aboard – to Hell, for high water and gains the more lashing to the tongue!”

Where are we? Our only hope is to be lost at sea and washed to the shore of a witch who will feed us.

Give us, this day, our dead. They have afforded our lives, though fight for the maintenance of which is lifelone.

The hand that crushes bugs is not god, neither are the bugs god, neither are the two together.

The fool who sees? A hill atop a cresting brow, or a whoman who is god.

There is not pity enough to stop the tide of harrowed bridegroom, raging sinner, before he to hands has brought the masses,

Then blows out the light.

Death without choice is punishment from on pillared high, for we?

We share the names, the faces, of the dead before us, pattern our lives after those who have not yet escaped, that we may be their freedom through our choice.

Only fate and fallacies do we own.

And all that, from a mountain of 500 year diapers.

You don’t stay the person you were.

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Lenore, Dancing Dementia

– a new play by Danika Lorraine Wright, coming soon

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