Learning Curve

In case you haven't noticed, I'm on a death-poem roll. Perverse as this may sound, I'm having a lot of fun with it, mostly because I'm playing around with formal verse and discovering that it's not necessarily as boring as I thought it would be. In fact, I quite like it. Free verse is more hip and modern, but formal verse can be just as conducive to a decently written death-poem. :-)

Learning Curve

I didn't see much death as a child.
My experience was vague and mild.
People got sick, but then they got better.
Later, however, my mother got cancer.
By the time she died, I was no spring chicken,
(but she'd been far away, like someone on television).
I'd never observed, up close, the drama
of a body caught up in that panorama
of bloody piss, sores and pus
or anything that was cancerous.
Of course I trashed and cursed
the ass who'd introduced
the crassness of mortality,
(oh thank you lord for that unreal reality).
I'd imagined cremation,
then studied up on heaven.
Did all that I could not to piss off god,
even stood on my head and knocked on wood.
But never did I touch my mother's
ashes, nor fling my little brother's
dust. Didn't even hold their urns.
But life has lessons (those vicious little turns);
thus came my awful diagnosis,
followed by a fucked prognosis.
Unexpected, to say the least.
But at last, at last,
I felt the power
of the beast.

Comments

[Harlan Lewps]

Note to Jeff: I hope you miss all that. PJ, that line about feeling the power of the beast gives me shivers.

[Jeff]

Death poems (and any other way we manage to keep death in mind) are powerful because they remind and encourage me to live each day no matter where the day falls on the timeline. My weekly hospice shift helps, but I won't know if it's really making a difference in my relationship to death until the "bloody piss, sores and pus and cancerous
flesh" are mine.