If you hear I'm dead, don't come to my funeral.

Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear

The trauma said, ‘Don’t write these poems.
Nobody wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones.

The dead look so terribly dead when they're dead.

The songs of the dead are the lamentations of the living.

Take your foot out of the graveyard,
they are busy being dead.

Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.

Silence is worse; all truths that are kept silent become poisonous.

I'm dying and all I hear are insults!

The living have no place at the feasts of the dead.

It’s an awful thing to hear a strong, desperate, fat man scream incontinently in a cave at daybreak.

There's a convention that one doesn't speak ill of the dead. That's stupid, I think. The truth's always the truth. On the whole it's better to keep your mouth shut about living people. You might conceivably injure them. The dead are past that. But the harm they've done lives after them sometimes.

I refuse to remember the dead.
And the dead are bored with the whole thing.
But you - you go ahead,
go on, go back down,
into the graveyard,
lie down where you think their faces are;
talk back to your old bad dreams.

What the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.