"All the Living are Dead, and the Dead are All Living..."
Windless
The coldest proof of immortality
is that day when I try to get up
but I lie in bed.
I want to be still
like the windless moon
and I realise that I am not the most important person in the world
to anyone.
After a war we fall out of the world.
We veterans with our shrapnel wounds hidden,
our bodies live outside us
and once or twice a year they have a parade for us.
When there's no parade,
we lie in our beds
and watch the sun moving across the window.
When there's no sun,
we try not to let the rain fill up our noses and our mouths
we try not to drown.
I had a friend once with absence seizures.
After a war we go absent and never come back.
If immortality were just in the bones,
there would still be something to hope for
but in the morning when I lie in bed
I realise that it doesn't matter to me that I have fallen out of the world.
Immortality in the place where the shrapnel settles
and no doctor can ever make it matter.
The coldest proof of immortality
is that day when I try to get up
but I lie in bed.
I want to be still
like the windless moon
and I realise that I am not the most important person in the world
to anyone.
After a war we fall out of the world.
We veterans with our shrapnel wounds hidden,
our bodies live outside us
and once or twice a year they have a parade for us.
When there's no parade,
we lie in our beds
and watch the sun moving across the window.
When there's no sun,
we try not to let the rain fill up our noses and our mouths
we try not to drown.
I had a friend once with absence seizures.
After a war we go absent and never come back.
If immortality were just in the bones,
there would still be something to hope for
but in the morning when I lie in bed
I realise that it doesn't matter to me that I have fallen out of the world.
Immortality in the place where the shrapnel settles
and no doctor can ever make it matter.