Innocent Indignity

 

A citizen dies, unable

To ask for the air to breathe.

A statesman dies, despite

Tanks of air and casks of drugs.

She says she could have helped,

But what would people say

If they knew she was hoarding?

He said he helped

But couldn't help enough.

*

Unable to trust her friends

To not spread the disease

Through her, to her family.

Unable to trust his wife's father

To keep death away from the mother

Of his yet-to-be-born child.

Unable to trust herself

To keep her mother alive.

Unable to trust those we must,

With and without a voice,

We cry without tears.

Through empty days,

Through hungry nights,

Through the stench of

A fever we haven't tamed.

There are more of the dead

Still to be counted,

Still to be burned.

Dignity lost as their

Bodies lay unclaimed.

Dignity lost as their

Bodies floated down the river.

Dignity lost, just as were their bodies.

*

A child runs across the empty street,

A coughing man lies prone ahead.

She nears him with an unmasked smile,

He turns in surprise,

Hands raised in protest,

She helps him

She rubs his cold hands,

He tells her to run away.

The child returns home

To her frail grandpa,

To her proud parents,

To the end of her world.

⁂

Shut within the Fourth Wall

"Man dies, man kills"

Candles stubbed, cold,

Blood encrusted sheets -

You stick a head out

To breathe in the night,

Sniffle, choke, cringe, dead.

Seek the lights at night,

Mighty sights in dreams,

Soaked in sweat, stay awake;

For flowers are from the past.

White behind eyelids,

Shut within the fourth wall;

Cry, cry, cry out loud:

They hear you as

Long as they're sober.

Faster than dogs,

If only we could have;

But caught, whipped, caged,

Drugged as deadly nightshade,

We are marble, we are red.

Man is both the dead and Death,

Man is both god and child,

Man is, but also not.

Why this world, why?

Colours jar the brain

Through this eternal night

Where we fight for light,

But only to test

Our dimming sight?

⁂

Sunday Best

Sunset, and the colours than linger,
Rain, and the earthy petrichor –
Is death a peaceful passage
From here to nirvana,
Or nothingness?

Doubt the future for pain,
When a shadow plays across the road
And a child passes
Well before her time.

Search for resolve
While humming an unheard melody –
The grass is taller now,
And the skies empty of stars
I grew up counting.

Spent the last moments
Putting on my Sunday best
‘Cause I can bow just once,
Before my big exit.

*

Rewrite: For All Those Living

Gliding through those gates and under the ancient arches, 
Lying on those bleached beds, amidst those gown'd in green;
Searching through the haze and returning
To look through windows I missed,
Helplessly slipping down a tightening shaft of light.

Reliving the shades of life before, "Oh, the pain",
Like a ghost floating over the past:

Walking in the glare of the city's lights,
Dazed by the towering skyscrapers-
Never tasting the snow, I tried to forget
The tumour and the blood-soaked papers.

As clinical odours seep through,
My mind's eye roves through memories to numb
The thrashing and twisting within.
I struggle to stay with the pain,
While a voice whispers, "Ironic that you'd want
To live this through when death itself
Is free from feeling".

Come hours, maybe days later, one of my blood:
A friend, a brother, one who'd die for me.
My voice, hoarse as it was in beseeching
Didn't have the strength to say it, as
His eyes glistened and his speech faltered.

Eyes refuse to watch another in despair,
Hearts refuse to accept death
That has no holding back.
I had hands that didn't feel the need to
Feed a dying body with a despairing soul.

A stare met a gaze; searching, begging -
For a release from the tumour, trial, and torment.
Those bells that tolled from a nearby town
Now approach, as sure as the sun's evening decline.

Just the throw of a switch - an act the age made
Easy for those wishing to take leave.

"I looked to him to commit,
He looked away with shame."

--

"His fingers completed the circuit,
He left with lips whispering my name."

*