My dead-yet-alive
are, you say, your
memory you’re keeping alive.
But no, without us they thrive.
This difference is more than semantics.
Tag Archives: death
Again personified
I’ve peeled out the inner part of death
and he was not what he seemed.
His strutting gave lie to fear
and frankly to his wanting, to
filling himself with all that he wanted to be.
Devil to the fisher bleary in his mind
Our hook is hidden in no dancing fly.
It hangs above the water with no enticement but
impalement. Our strength is in stillness
and waiting.
A look in the ledger
I dreamed I was dead
and woke and was not.
Whose time is this time?
How much have I got?
Mr. Cantankerous
They say we’re evolving into robots,
or rather,
six-million-dollar men, adjusted for inflation,
or actually deflation,
since we’ll become cheaper to make,
and we’ll be everywhere, like plastic stuff
no one wants (not now, though later they will).
“People 2.0” we’ll be, they say,
though no self-respecting robot
would use that term. We don’t
go around calling ourselves
“the chimps” now, now do we?
So yes, we’ll be off flying ourselves
through space in ships oiled to light
beams, just ahead, I suppose,
of the bombs we’ve built
and the rising sea with all the
dead fish in it (it’s a vision
of hope, as I understand it, a new
chance to get it right).
Meanwhile, though, I’m stuck on this
future trash pile on Good Friday
2017, clinging to my cross,
a chimp and chump weak in the wind
of God 2.0
I die for death
I die for death has comforted me.
She has spread her blanket and lain sad beside me,
and looked wide-eyed, and waited.
Outwitting dying
I shook off dying
and was left undying,
but how was it other
than what I already was?
Something else
So it wasn’t death, deathless bird,
weeks later hopping in our yard.
It was a condition of which I’d never heard:
a bird’s days wingless and catless.
Quite content with the alternative
I lay by my wife and felt her fingers,
and then all her bones together –
a skeletal, scary thought
with a cold wind blowing through it –
so I hastened to add the rest,
first the organs and then the
blood and tissues I couldn’t name,
and finally the skin and
mass of golden hair.
But even then she wasn’t herself,
so I started decking her out
with all her qualities, her smile and
hard soft-heartedness,
her way of leaving things
and that twist when she dances.
And how she cooks, with her million recipes,
and curls up in the corner of the couch.
The further I went, the warmer she,
and the drowsier I,
got, and God it’s good
to sleep with her
and not with that bag of bones!
Commuter
Amid the vast network of tracks and trains
one puts his body in and
it matters a lot whether he
puts it in or in front of the
train. We who ride know
the difference, but he who
has stalled and rerouted us
is blank, extinguished,
a smoke without a flame
Utrecht Journal 