Translation: I am not fit to be around people or impart wisdom tonight. By tomorrow night, I will look like an extra on a zombie movie. Let's call it Night of the Grading Dead.
Billy Collins writes about being dead . . .
All Eyes
by: Billy Collins
Just because I'm dead now doesn't mean
I don't exist anymore.
All those eulogies and the obituary
in the corner of the newspaper
have made me feel more vibrant than ever.
I'm here in some fashion,
maybe like a gust of wind
that disturbs the upper leaves,
or blows a hat around a corner,
or disperses a little cloud of mayflies over a stream.
What I like best about this
is you realizing you can no longer
get away with things the way your used to
when it would be ten o'clock at night
and I wouldn't know where you were.
I'm all ears, you liked to say
whenever you couldn't bother listening.
And now you know that I'm all eyes,
looking in every direction,
and a special eye is always trained on you.
I often imagine my dead as spirits constantly around me, watching my every move. That's both comforting and terrifying at the same time. Tonight, I wish I could hand them my laptop, tell them what needs to be graded, and go to bed.
I can't do that, obviously, because I don't know if ghosts can identify a comma splice or a sentence fragment.
Therefore, it is going to be a long, sleepless night.
Saint Marty did step into his backyard a moment ago and saw a bright star burning in his neighbor's window. Even in the midst of darkness, there is light.
❤️
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