A perfume I saw in Lush the other day. The description reads: "Death & Decay. Let it transport you to a serene space where the fullness of beauty and its inevitable decay can be contemplated without fear."

The sun is hidden behind the clouds, and yet she still divulges her presence in subtle things-- the freckles on my sister's face, the flowers who strain their thin green necks towards the sky. I am sick of the sun and the summer, so I play Nina Simone and pretend it is autumn, swathing myself in sweaters and coats.

...

an excerpt:

"Today we are going to the funeral home. I am to read a poem at the service (thankfully, not one of my own) and so I powder my face, put on a pretty dress and try my best to conceal the blood-shot ellipse on my throat. The white powder makes the hickey feel more obvious than ever, like a ghost wearing a white sheet. I have never been good at make up. Online, it says to use a green concealer, and so I paint my throat with emerald eyeshadow, which is useless. It feels fucking absurd that I'm spending the hours before this funeral trying to cover up a hickey.

My throat paunches and contracts. The bloated, croaking vocal sac of a frog. Tiddalik."

...

another excerpt:

"I wore sneakers to my grandmother's funeral and I feel guilty about it."

...

Grief reconfigures the brain, re-informs memories, resets thought patterns and neural pathways. Grief is the chasm between is/was. Grief is painful unlearning/relearning. A brand new type of punctuation for everything you've ever written.

...

Poetry as a cemetery. A cemetery of faces, hands, gestures. A cemetery of clouds, colors of the sky, a graveyard of winds, branches, jasmine (the jasmine from Swidnik), the statue of a saint from Marseilles, a single poplar over the Black Sea, a graveyard of moments and hours, burnt offerings of words. Eternal rest be yours in words, eternal rest, eternal light of recollection.

—	Anna Kamienska (trans. Clare Cavanagh) in Industrious Amazement

An obscenely morbid blog post about death or something.

I. It's January now, and that means that the sidewalk is strewn with dead Christmas trees put out for the council clean up. The heady smell of rotting pine trees imbues the neighbourhood with a sort of gothic festivity. Most houses have pulled down their seasonal fairy lights and fluorescent reindeer, but occasionally one will still pass some plastic Santa Clause decoration, wilted in the heat and covered in a thin layer of grime. The dead trees make for a melodramatic portrait, lying on top of each other like plague victims. Why does everything seem dead in summer? The trees look like dead birds, their green-brown feathers rolling out of their follicles, revealing their craggy, prehistoric limbs.

II.

The Head Next to Mine on the Pillow 

When I awoke in the morning

There on the pillow beside me lay the moth.

His fluffy head was still tucked down

Like a late sleeper's, but the eyes, those fascinated

Lamps that had drunk so deep of light

During the night, the eyes were dull.

And a soft powder had fallen

From the tattered wings folded

In the high final dive.

I might have been, perhaps,

The last thing he saw as the light flooded

His gentle body - why, yes, it could be

I was a big thing in his life at the last,

Enigmatic as an Easter Island statue,

Before the tide took him out

To where there is only flying

And all the filaments are friendly.

— Bruce Dawe

III. Down at Wylie's Baths, a dead blowfish is floating on top of the water, bobbing up and down like some absurd, swollen apple at a county fair. Its slimy white belly flashes white amongst the blue-green of the water. No one is swimming in the pool anymore. Everyone is watching the fish. Although surely all manner of dead creatures lie rotting on the floor of the ocean pool, nobody dares to share the water with one as visible as the fish. Eventually, one of the life guards wanders over with a long pool skimmer and scoops the blowfish out of the water, along with an empty coke bottle and some seaweed. Slowly, people go back to swimming.

IV.

"Caterpillars Eating a Tomato" from Food Chain by Catherine Chalmers.

A particularly horrifying but also beautiful but mostly horrifying photography series from the 90s that I first heard about on this episode of This American Life.

V. I am walking my dogs along the beach front when a black helicopter lands on the hill near the memorial. Literally hundreds of spectators have gathered to watch. I trudge up to the top along the path. Beach goers with their phones out crane their necks over the railing along the cliff face to glimpse at what is going on at the foot of the cliff. A person in a white suit is abseiling down the cliff, whilst another prepares a portable gurney to be winched down. There are several police vehicles parked on the grass, and officers amble around casually behind the police tape. Two reporters with iPads arrive and station themselves on the grass next to the police tape, tapping away at their screens. They seem to know one another, and chat amicably about their morning. Also present: a young mother and her son, watching. She is pointing out the different types of emergency vehicles present. A police officer skulks around to her and stands over her. You should leave, he says to her, you don't want the kid to see this.

VI. I find a dead beetle on my walk home one day. The sun is setting. I kneel on the nearest nature strip and dig a hole in the grass with my fingertips. I bury the beetle in the hole. I brush my hands on my jeans and continue walking.

VII. I have nothing more to say now. Goodnight.