The mental pictures I have of my parents and grandparents and my
childhood are beginning to break up into small fragments and get
blown away from me into empty space, and the same wind is sucking
me toward it ever so gently, so gently as not even to raise a hair on my
head (though the truth is that there are very few of them to be raised).
I’m starting to take the idea of death as the end of life somewhat harder
than before. I used to wonder why people seemed to think that life is
tragic or sad. Isn’t it also comic and funny? And beyond all that, isn’t
it amazing and marvelous? Yes, but only if you have it. And I am starting
not to have it. The pictures are disintegrating, as if their molecules were
saying, “I’ve had enough,” ready to go somewhere else and form a new
configuration. They betray us, those molecules, we who have loved them.
They treat us like dirt.

Ron Padgett | Collected Poems, 2013

Juana Olga Barrios | Primitivos