The fatal Atropus[1] snip
that severs the thread of life.
The distraught destruction of death
which leaves the blank stare
and limbs both limp and stiff.
The motionless shell
prepared by
the mortician’s apprentice
for one final appearance.
The soul has fled
its human tomb.

Once a person who pampered your world,
and cared and worried for you,
and gave time a personality
and being a name
and space a meaning.

First, denials—
pathetic quiet—
fragile farewells—
oceanic tears.
An emotional wall
of goodbye graffiti
recollected memories
scrawled in obituaries—
life’s fractions
dated and divided.

The voice of reality
brings you back
and keeps you here—
detached in a twilight zone
while the departed
is ferried across
a Hades river—
gone to Elysium.

You never forget—
you absorb the experience
and it becomes
part of you.
In memoriam
ad infinitum.