modernist poem

Every man dies his own death.

Every death is a macrocosmic poem,
a living poem,
the seizuring, sighing, three-dimensional manifest
of the essential poem that has lain piteously
in the vulnerable blurred borders between stomach and liver,
leeching its black beautiful cancer into wearied forms.

From the bright thrash of birth, every swell of hate
has drained into the poem and left the body weary.
From the first swollen bout of love
all endorphins settle like silt into the poem, leaving weary the body.
The mind hangs, pomaceous, from a white branch of spine;
it readies its seed for a drop, awaiting the poem's fertility.

The poem passes its existence in sanguine catatonia,
and only under the exquisite flare of death may it awaken.
It is as the crocus in spring: absent and then,
suddenly, wonderfully, stabbing into blossom,
nourished with hate and wombed by love and
coaxed into phoenician vibrance by the last gravid tremble of life.

Every man writes his own poem,
and no man dies alone.