Today I remembered that you are dead, a word that means ended and never to begin or even be again. Which doesn’t seem quite accurate.

You? Dead? Yet ever pesent–to me at least. Today I remembered you
are dead. Weird I know I forget which is just that I do not think of you

as no more. I mean you are no more if not in the abstraction of it all: death and absence. Something about seeing your photos, smelling you

inactualizes it. Of course we would surely believe ourselves too simple
or complicated for this kind of esoteric contemplation. Today maybe

it wasn’t remembering at all but realizing–probably that’s what I was doing, you know, that you are dead, and it felt like chewing foil

but not just in my teeth, all over. And I started wondering while I’m
still midlife young but not young buck young if when I am no longer

either and you are still not here will I go on forgetting and realizing
this same way, being overwhelmed by the bloom of remembering.