murder nom silence kills 040501 ... n o m e e murder. 101216 ... kerry i wonder if we would have been better off without you, you sitting and watching in silence as everyone else picks up the pieces, all of us, decades of secrecy and shame and mystery trailing you even in death, your second death. maybe it would have been better if you hadn’t been so inept, pathetic, punished only yourself and not everyone else. weekly visits for years, weekly walks down hallways lined with near-corpses who reached for us. our softness must have sparked something deep in them. until i was seven i watched you, a man who had supposedly been so sweet, that’s what they chose to remember so who knows if it’s true, finally blank and hollow and not knowing her, and how gracefully she accepted that. as i grow older i look more closely at her eyes and my not-understanding now seems outrageous; how could she feel anything else, how could she let go of such a thing? i also hear it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission but this is an exception. i didn’t know then how happy you were when i was born, i hadn’t seen the pictures of you holding and smiling at me. you were already old and wearing a fedora, a dignified man raised in a shack in mississippi who fled to the city, straight-nosed and sharp-chinned, hungry for everything. i paid a couple bucks to find the announcement in the newspaper, july 21 1987, and was disappointed to see it said nothing i didn’t already know. it left out so much, just an erasure to protect your legacy that only seems unfair to me now. but i did see the word no one dares to utter. it echoes in my head, rolls over my tongue, but more often than not it is now just a file on my computer desktop. i don’t know where else to put it. 211104 what's it to you? who go blather from