dead in your coffin

why do we look at you?

why do we stare?

will you return to smile

as long as we smile like you?

we bring our fears and anger

our disgust and hate;

we bring our flowers and "wish fors"

for  you to contemplate.

o, this slow trudge to your wake!

these dragging feet, these folded hands;

these mem'ries we long regret,

our hearts filled with spite.

i wonder, wonder, wonder,

what you'd think or speak,

what feelings you'd regurgitate

if i lay down atop your grave.

so, speak, i beg you, speak!

say something worthwhile for once

cause what's been has not been good

as i suckle these thoughts of you,

thoughts i long to dissipate

cast into the liquid fire of hell

or throw with hope towards heaven

to free me with might or light.

o, these feelings heat'ly stirring

these emotive reflections in time full-borne

of you and me and several others

present, spying, now that you are gone.

*Faith is not communicated by means of doctrine only, but in spite of and apart from it, to everyone who believes that something opens up beyond human experience.

-Jean Sulivan

*...in the last analysis neither laws nor rituals create love; they imply it. The death of Jesus radically challenges for all times those social mechanisms that substitute culpability or repression for love.  "All men naturally hate each other," Pascal says.  "People have used desire to serve the common good, but it's just a pretense, a false image of charity; ultimately, it is only hatred."  One has to want to be a dupe to believe that love can be harmonized with worldly prudence and good will, with the "virtues" that help arrange our comfort or a "justice" that is nothing but the organization of universal greed.

-Jean Sulivan