Like I Do?

Do you know death?

Has he breathed his foggy breath in your ears?

Did you recognize the smell of the attic?

Did his dusty demeanor make you sneeze?

I know I did.

He sits behind me in the family portrait.

It gathers dust on the mantlepiece. I beg.

And there's nothing I can do to ignore...

There was a knock.

It was against my ribs. The low moan

Like the bloat was weeping again.

He coddled my new flesh as it bubbled like soap.

Midnight the clock trilled.

The cleansing was fleeting; quiet but not lonely.

It was a total repression, regression; born into Death.

He was everything- in totality, a mother, but

He was a stranger.

He does not smell like rot. He is not bone.

He does not wear a shroud. He was not alone.

You went with him that day. He was not for me.

He was not in my head.

He is the face of my mother. He is the hands of my father.

He speaks in tongues only I can decipher.

He is a beginning, breathing slower than Death.

He entered my Life.

He is not to be mistaken for Greed - his eyes are flat brass.

And his strange disposition will turn one blue.

But when he took you away, that was the Death. The Black.

He stole your Light.

He made me dead.