When I'm Gone

Weave my empty husk into a basket
A seedling’s tangled roots
To blanket and comfort
In my eternal rest
Let me re-enter this world as a tree
Dropping leaves in the breeze
Buds blossoming each spring

Only don’t hold services
Or plant a plaque of remembrance
At the roots now serving as my feet
None should come to admire my
Resilient branches
Or pour out false grief intended for
The benefit of their peers

Once I’ve departed these shores
Crocodile tears won’t
Water my new Arboreal form
I spent my animate days alone
I’ll accept no mourning now

Better to cremate me and
Bake me into a pot
Form red clay of the
Earth from which I
Ventured forth into
Pointy amphora
Paint its exaggeratedly formed well
With ash grey enamel
Shatter my glazed outsides
Reset and grout the
Mosaic of my life with gold
Highlighting every fissure and crack

Scatter me to the fifth wind
Let my psyche
Fade into obscurity
Swirled into a riptide
Melded with the
Desperate sea, perpetually
Calling…

I need no funeral procession
To play me off of this stage of folly
I have written the ending
There is elegance in simplicity
I prefer to simply fade to black
Fin.

K.B. Silver

Don't worry, I'm not suicidal or terminally ill; it's just a poem. It's really about the extremely conditional love I have received from my family, and the fakeness they displayed in public, usually to get sympathy and attention. Sympathy for having to take care of me, for being burdened with such an imperfect daughter. As if there was such a thing as perfect.