Pineiro is a published poet and the supervisor of English at Montgomery High School in New Jersey. In the following essay, he considers the death of reason in "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain."

In Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, both Tom and his pal Huck Finn get the chance to witness their own funerals and experience the heartfelt loss of those they leave behind. After creating the evidence of their feigned death, they are lucky enough to experience what most people have fantasized about at one time or another, they observe the world's response to their leaving it. They are able to see and hear the sobbing mourners crying over how much they will miss them; how unfair it was for their short lives to be ended so soon, and so on. Nevertheless, the boys are not dead, and their experience is fully...