“It was when they determined that I had been born deadThat my life became easier to understand. For a long time,I wondered why rooms felt colder when I entered them,Why nothing I said seemed to stick in anyone’s ear,Frankly, why I never had any money. I wonderedWhy the cities I walked through drifted into cloudEven as I admired their architecture, as I pointed outThe cornerstones marked “1820,” “1950.” The only songsI ever loved were filled with scratch, dispatches from A time when dead ones like me were a dime a dozen.I spent my life in hotels: some looked like mansions,Some more like trailer parks, or pathways towardA future I tried to point to, but how could I point,With nothing but a hand no hand ever matched,With fingers that melted into words that no one read. I rehearsed names that others taught me: Caravaggio,Robert Brandom, Judith, Amber, Emmanuelle Cat. I got hungry the way only the dead get hungry,The hunger that launches a thousand dirty wars,But I never took part in the wars, because no one letsA dead man into their covert discussions.So I drifted from loft to cellar, ageless like a ghost,And America became my compass, and Europe became The way that dead folks talk, in short, who cares,There’s nothing to say because nobody listens,There’s no radio for the dead and the pillows seemLike sand. Let me explain: when you’re alive,As I understand it, pillows cushion the head, the wayA lover might soothe the heart. The way it works for me,In contrast, is everything is sand. Beds are sand,The women I profess to love are sand, the sound of musicIn the darkest night is sand, and whatever I have to sayIs sand. This is not, for example, a political poem,Because the dead have no politics. They might haveA hunger, but nothing you’ve ever knownCould begin to assuage it.”

“One night I dreamed I was walking along the beach with the Lord. Many scenes from my life flashed across the sky.In each scene I noticed footprints in the sand. Sometimes there were two sets of footprints, other times there was one only.This bothered me because I noticed that during the low periods of my life, when I was suffering from anguish, sorrow or defeat, I could see only one set of footprints, so I said to the Lord,You promised me Lord,that if I followed you, you would walk with me always. But I have noticed that during the most trying periods of my life there has only been one set of footprints in the sand. Why, when I needed you most, have you not been there for me?”The Lord replied, “The years when you have seen only one set of footprints, my child, is when I carried you.”

“One night I dreamed a dream.I was walking along the beach with my Lord. Across the dark sky flashed scenes from my life. For each scene, I noticed two sets of footprints in the sand, one belonging to me and one to my Lord.When the last scene of my life shot before me I looked back at the footprints in the sand. There was only one set of footprints. I realized that this was at the lowest and saddest times of my life. This always bothered me and I questioned the Lord about my dilemma. "Lord, You told me when I decided to follow You, You would walk and talk with me all the way. But I'm aware that during the most troublesome times of my life there is only one set of footprints. I just don't understand why, when I need You most, You leave me."He whispered, "My precious child, I love you and will never leave you, never, ever, during your trials and testings. When you saw only one set of footprints, It was then that I carried you.”

“I had removed my patent leather shoes after a while, for they foundered badly in the sand. It pleased me to think they would be perched there on the silver log, pointing out to sea, like a sort of soul-compass, after I was dead.”

“Banquo asked me how it felt to be alive when I saw so many of my comrades dead or dying, and I said that I had ceased to think of life or death because it seemed that I was destined to serve out the sentence of one for having delivered so well of the other, and that I saw the dead every night before I went to sleep as though they were still alive and standing before me.”

“But in the same token, I wondered how I was still standing. Why wasn’t I six feet under from the shock of what had happened? How was I living, breathing, and lying like nothing had happened? Part of me might have been living, but the other part of me wished I was dead. I shuddered at the thought. I closed my eyes and pressed myself closer to Will. For the first time all morning, I felt safe.”

“He wasn’t even sure he was alive, because he was living like a dead man. Whereas it looked as if I was the one who’d come up emptyhanded. But I was sure about me, about everything, surer than he could ever be, sure of my life and sure of my death I had waiting for me… I had been right, I was still right, I was always right. I had lived my life one way and I could just as well have lived it another. I had done this and I hadn’t done that… Nothing, nothing mattered, and I knew why. So did he. Throughout the whole absurd life I’ve lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, this wind leveled whatever was offered to me at the time, in years no more real than the ones I was living. What did other people’s deaths or a mother’s love matter to me; what did his God or the lives people choose or the fate they think they elect matter to me when we’re all elected by the same fate, me and billions of privileged people like him who also called themselves my brothers?”