2013.11.24 A Death Bed and Death Becomes a Fushigi

I wrote a poem last week! And as I am struggling to make time to do that which I love to do, which is blog, I am using that as an excuse to do an actual blog. I have re-resolved to keep my blog posts simple, right now. So, what could be simpler than posting a poem. One that I actually wrote.

And, even better, a poem that generated with its genesis a small death fushigi.

It was prompted by the WSS's 188th Weekly Poetry Stuffage thread writing prompt An Old Bridge :

A Death Bed Rev1

I am alive in my death bed.
An odd place to be, I confess to having thought.

I sip fluids, not just water,
through a straw stuck in a spill-proof cup,
that is held by hands that are not my own,
that never seem to touch me, even accidentally,
masked as they are beneath medicine's need for rubberized sterility.

I move my eyes to see the source of kindness,
even if paid for and indifferent,
but I am unable to see who has come,
who quietly helps keep me alive.

Death watches me.
Sexless and hard, death stands weightless at my feet,
without expression or expectation. **
I didn't think Death would be this,
a visceral two-footed ghost
standing between the me I am
and the me
I am afraid
I will no longer
be.

I don't know why, but I thought Death would be a woman.
Odd.
And odd that Death would be more and less than her touch,
not la petite mort as I might have imagined in my bad poetry days.
My salad daze.
But then women were never what I thought they would be.
My sexual haze.

Ignorance. Billy boy claimed that vanity is all.
I thought I used to agree with him, but he was wrong!
So wrong. I know now that
ignorance trumps that wanton's mirror,
and vanity is merely its plaything.

I sip the fluids with which I am anonymously infused,
the liquid bridge between a diminishing old age
and the potential of nothingness laying in weightlessness.
I am alive in my death bed.
Rubber hands handle me
and all the while Death stands without waiting.

** Fushigi alert: As I was writing this stanza, in a random play on my iTunes, the Mumford and Sons' song Timshel came into my ears. The lyrics caught my ear:

...
And death is at your doorstep
And it will steal your innocence
But it will not steal your substance
...

And it is done.

2014.08.30 Addendum
It took only nine months, but A Death Bed has been read 50+ times on Readwave. Yes, a whole fifty-plus times, which brought a smile to my face.