The Graveyard in the Sun

26-06-11


I went on that day to find someone like you amongst all the other so-called sleeping prisoners. Cast in the sunshine I went wandering as some kind of exile in the horizon of the dead, this is the only place where the land is laid out to stretch, where there is some pretence of. Why are care and the community more thorough once you’re under ground? Headless angels and forgotten names are landscaping my day out for you if they are still there, you are not here you are somewhere else but I feel like visiting your compatriots is the best I can do today. This is the only part of the city where life and death are allowed to meet up in plain view.


Frank, Hannah and William go by and a cider bottle or a bottle of some fermented juice to drink away loss, and there I was I found me. It is somewhat odd to come across a gravestone with your own name on it. A married dead version of me it would seem. Frank and Hannah and William are odd company but not as odd as the headstone that has nothing on it, imagine being dead and anonymous. Is that a failure of a death? I count the ages walking by and play the sick game of finding the youngest death; I think I found an infant of several weeks. I then wander all the away across the graveyard looking for the opposite, it doesn’t ring out in your eyes as much to see ordinary sized deaths, the later the graves the later they die and later and later. What time is it?

The uneven graves hide under the wonderful day. So untidy up close, like the flawed contours and cracks are hidden by a conspiratorial sky and ‘our loved ones’ can keep up not having their flaws noticed. Going by me are a middle-aged couple, or a couple of people, a husband and wife, a brother and sister, two friends? Dead people have a habit of bringing people together, even if it’s the ritualistic and necessary cleaning people come here to do.