in our cancer of passion; marvel

[garbage]

Alive? he might be dead for aught I know, With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain, And eyes squeezed shut ‘neath rusty mane; Death brings no absolution. He followed her into the ocean, and then -- darkness, for a time. A sweet darkness, a cherished one, because nothing mattered - he did not matter. He was inconsequential. Of course, there were no pearly gates, no chorus of angels. He'd never expected such things, such frivolity.  There was no hell-fire, either. For this, he was grateful, for if anyone deserved hell, it was him. A blink, and then-- His body was made corporeal again, though perhaps more transparent. Still, he inhabits the same dulled body he once wandered so tiredly within, and it feels devastatingly familiar.  It feels unwanted, unwelcome. Unlike many, he'd died late, far too late. He had welcomed death, embraced it on that smoky shore. He had forsaken his old body, and willingly so, with no regard or thought to what lay ahead. He shouldn't be here, walking strange shores again. Yet he is. He is terribly here, in this realm that hovers in a world where it exists and does not exist. Because there is a reason. There must be.  Someone wants me, he thinks, and the thought causes him to shudder. He is not a man who should be wanted. "Hello?" he calls out to the ghosts, the ones like him, and he aches for the darkness to return. Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe; I never saw a brute I hated so; He must be wicked to deserve such pain.