Collectible
The scythe bleeds for my neck
as I flail through the emptiness
clawing at my soul
Insignificant speck
filled with ego and pettiness
holding on for control
The sinister speed of the final swipe
was so clean and so swift
it was nearly imperceptible
The only real clue was the blood red stripe
and the dark's subtle shift
as my soul was now collectible
The Death
Sparkles sizzle when its bony hand strokes
the blood-stained scythe that flutters in its might
and I hear the creaking sound night by night
while its obscure face a grimy cloth cloaks.
And night by night I pale and shake in fear
that your almighty scythe will end my life
but you just calmly sit there, free from strife
sharpening your tool, then you disappear.
Then one cold December night you appear,
take off your cloak, revealing face so vile
my body freezes to its spiteful smile
my pulse dying to the cold touch of steel.
Metamorphosis
Gifted from birth, the reaper held the scythe in its bony hands. Twirling it to see the etched surname it was given long ago, sometime between cuneiform writing was invented and the present-day where those with a pulse feared it. The symbols only it could read were taught to it long ago by a father as a mother held it in her arms, radiating love through her flesh. No one would think that Death had a family, except the last one who looked up at him with bruised hazel eyes and asked softly what it was like to have a family that loved them. The reaper had not answered, for the utterance of a voice would have scared the little soul, but tried to show him by taking the little hand and gently helping it out of the body that had never known a day without pain.
How the reaper had wished this was not its job. There had been thousands just like this little one in its century and a half since assuming the robe and family scythe, but if it had ever had a heart, the hazel-eyed victim would have been the one that stuck to this reaper's. The reaper had taken the long way to try to show him love. They passed parks where dogs played with their owners and cats slinked, watching the reaper with fearful eyes. They went past schools where mothers and fathers embraced their children after a long day and held their warm hands as they took them home. The reaper watched the boy clutching his phalanges, and wondered if it made a difference. It never occurred to it before that day that reaping could make a difference for someone.
Upon the pearly gates, the child was welcomed home. The pain was erased and the child was gone, but the reaper remained, perplexed by the encounter. Images of the child being embraced by others, kissed and loved for the very first time flashed through the reaper's cranium. The child smiling without forcing it, waving back at the reaper, his first and only friend.
Boston
There was a time in Boston, or rather a moment. I was leaving a bar with a man who would never text me first, who didn't think about me when I wasn't around. Suddenly, a telephone pole fell onto the sidewalk. But there had been a person in that spot, and just like that, in a single, horrible instant, that person was face-down on the sidewalk, leaking fluids from their brain, fluids that quickly were forming a puddle that grew like a silence.
The fact that in less than a second, someone had been reduced to brain fluids, their face withheld from me - just a body, just someone with people screaming beside them. And I looked at this man, the man I was leaving the bar with, and he said, "Oh."
He said: "It's okay."
In that instant, in less than a second, Boston became to me just that: something less than a second, a quick blunt force trauma, a bloody mess. A perfect storm of horrible timing. A tragedy.
As we walked away - we had to, it was impolite to stare - I thought about how horrible this man was, the man who was leading me away from this horrible mess. I thought about how we had just been in that very spot, on the sidewalk, walking out of the bar. I thought about how timing is everything. I thought about how lucky it was that we hadn't been standing there at the exact second the telephone pole came down.
It had been a matter of seconds.
I thought about thinking, about how the brain eventually shuts itself down: in sleep, in dissociation, in death.
I thought today: that moment should have tied me to that horrible man, the one who didn't text me first, forever.
Or: it could have. But it didn't.
And that is a miracle. In tragedy: life keeps moving, blood keeps flowing, but inside us, where we keep thinking.