The Redundancy of Individuality

A recognition to how the forgotten dead are remembered. As cliché as it sounds.

So it came to be

that I greeted Death with open arms;

she spread her crippled wings

and I, in her embrace,

stepped through the threshold.

My fleshy curves shall rot under Death's ragged cloak.

Maggots shall burn off me,

devouring every remnant of who I once was

until I am no more a person

but a fading tombstone, in a field of strangers.

Under the ever-constant shadow of Death

old men shall clutch each other's arms 

on park benches,

dripping with Thursday late-afternoon sun

and quietly scream in the face of Finite's gnarled jaws. 

When you, too, have died

there will be no one to forget me.

And under Death's same shadow

I will be remembered as "the dead"

and not my name.

And although I'll never taste Life's breath again

I shall stand behind the old mens' bench

place a hand upon their shoulders 

and whisper,

"Are you afraid to die?"

Author's Note

I've never actually liked this one. It was just a filler.

Reviews

[TLK]

Everything is just a filler. Mind needs to constitute something to appraise, as mind eternally appraising mind is madness.

Regarding this 'filler', I think the first stanza sets the scene with some redundance and can be safely slain. Put it in its box, mourn it not, so many children die nowadays because of the famine.
First line of the second: yes. Fleshy vs. ragged. The image of consoling Death kneeling over the almost-living body, all viewed through the holes in the fabric. Yes. 'Field of strangers', what a transition from the personal to the invisible.

Stanza four: you pull back and reveal the way that history squashes us into insignificance so quickly.

The final stanza takes what, at first, seems out-of-touch with the rest of the poem and quite literally brings it under the spectre's influence.