There’s a body
in this lovely spiritual book,
pressed flat between
pages 138 and
139.

From the clothing
it’s old news.
From the color
of the face,
it’s no one worthy of
investigation. 

An old murder, then,
long forgotten.  The author
must have needed
credibility and then
abandoned the deceased.
It’s likely
no one
was meant to discover it.
Instead, it was likely
a source to be
concealed.  Stupidly,
an assumption was made

that the text itself
would render it invisible.
After all, reading the book
reveals that whatever
the dead told the author
was changed
for marketing purposes
and stripped of 
context.

If you pick up
enough books on
our histories and 
cultures, you’ll find
a lot of these corpses.
Par for the course,
business as usual,
the way of the world —
kill ’em all,
let the consumers
sort them out,
hope they don’t notice
the stink
and the stained pages.
Any mourning
is left to us —

the ones
who learned how to live
less obviously.  Who just
live.  Who aren’t compressed
and dried and mere
bookmarks in dishonest
funeral guestbooks.  Who still breathe
rage and spit memory of
how many of us
ended up
like this, and how few readers
will pause
between pages 138 and 139
to notice
the body
when its shadow
crosses their minds.