Fighting Mistaken Necrophoresis

Irreversibly nonfunctional
Is a fairly high standard for death.
An ant has only to smell like death

To be carted, flailing, from the nest.
And yet, it’s a low standard as well.
Past behaviors, as everyone learns,

Remain in past’s irreversible
World, nonfunctional as corpses now.
Grief evolved as a strategic hedge

Against those rare cases when functions
End, or seem to, but begin again,
And there are many functions in life

That have irreversibly ended
While others carry on, and even
To this day uncertainty lingers

Over which exact part of the end
Is definitely genuine end.
You needn’t be Edgar Allan Poe

To give yourself a little shudder
Thinking of waking in your coffin—
Imagine a crematorium.

Of all the functions that cease and can’t
Restart, which is every one of them
Eventually, the one that matters

Most is the ability to pay
Attention. Not often mistaken
For death, it’s the core death nonetheless.

Attention gives everything meaning,
And there’s no meaning from a human
Irreversibly inattentive.

The secret of spiritualism
Wasn’t the seance’s trickery.
The secret was that, without a pulse,

A brainwave, any body at all,
What gave fresh life to grief was response,
The wraith of functioning attention.