well before dawn
bats her eyelashes
at a yawning horizon
i claw my way free
emerging from six feet under

burgeoning with fingernails
still caked in dirt from ceaseless digging
unable to slumber with a tombstone as a pillow

a corpse interned
amidst the earth's embrace
deadening this landscape
souring the soil
infecting every body
within proximity

i've been pushing my luck
in place of daisies
locked within the confines
of a mass grave
sunken past the rifts
into tremor-torn trenches  
adrift with all the cadavers
lost and scattered across the deep

searching for some clarity
amidst misremembered memories
so i might finally rest in peace
not pieces