Futility of Dreams From the Bottom of the Sea

the moments between life and death

Image pixabay

Not everyone who dies gets the funeral they deserve.

They fished his body out,

White balloon flesh flaked off on

Grappling hooks, not malevolent

Not kind just flinty black

— All utilitarian, you understand —

He was not frozen not clammy,

Nor cold, as though not even conceived

Nor imagined, roundly denied acknowledgment,

Even that of a squashed frog, and so much

Silent rain running with horizontal

Precision into a liquid continuity,

Like Chinese water torture protracted to

A slug’s lifetime of quickening

Death on slow slime roadways, but

Texture nevertheless,

choked on unremarkable

Lives in an enormous court of law.

Hull of a luxury liner was the

Backdrop to a falling body

Stripped in that instant of all morality,

Choices and deities,