When I was younger I didn't know
Where all the bodies of dead people go.
Nobody told me they simply decayed;
And all I could think of were all those graves.
I imagined them just beneath my feet,
Under the floorboards, under the street;
And if I happened to walk too slow,
They'd reach through the dirt and pull me below.
I concluded that when a person dies,
He's sealed in a coffin, just his size,
And buried six feet under the ground,
Along with the corpses farther down;
But millions and millions of people had died,
And if they were all laid side by side,
The earth wouldn't hold them, the soil would burst,
And the dead that were freshest would crawl out first.
Sometimes I still have the fevered dreams;
When the creaks and the shadows are not what they seem,
I can hear my worst fear from the years before:
The dead people whispering under the floor.
