Put a friendly face on death and make him my
friend. Bring diseases curled as gifts, as water on
dry tongues, and on health-stain tort in whisked
hues that all sing sad songs of early deaths. Bring
me daily, hot food on warm plates, stone cold and
grotesque. Bring it all briskly to the coffin I call
my bed, and there I'll watch myself die.

And have the Priest fit on the site of my birth,
for I'll be born a dead boy anyway. Stuck with
lab venom; your cures at the end of sticks
plunged quietly into my skin. All stilted vats
of Death in good taste– jet blindness; splash
misery for Mothers– Mock execution on mass
for nameless rats who'd been held as babies.

But now I'm old, old as a child can be without death,
how can I breath in such vile brews as the air?
Downtrodden clouds roiled by atrocity; roiled and
molested white carapace that falls day by day, each
onto innocent lungs-aged madly. But what tranquil
traumas I have witnessed– on soft eyes and soft skin–
on groves I'd though real– and how maybe if I never
spend my time here, I can never waste it, for we'll
all have drank from the tass before too long.