I wasn’t ready for what it meant.
The blood has ran its course.
You leave me here to ponder,
If I could have had more.

Regret is a sadistic thing,
I wished for nothing more than death.
That clasps me in her sweet embrace,
Still and kind and quick.

Your razors measure thin,
An inch away off my tapestry.
You hesitate, and wait.
So short yet still mine if only for a moment.

I am alive and still here,

In the waiting room of the fates themselves.
-Percy

By the ramp of the dearly departed
Still lay his faded fingerprints
While yet another
Was thrown in the morbid bed
Still reeking
like death

The hall deserted
His breathing slow
Hope fading
The morale low
Thoughts crept
Like death

And another after another
Was thrown into the list
Ever growing
Breaths slowing
Ever reeking
Like death

Lying in a corner
Groaning beneath the mask
A soul once alive
Moaning over the past
Waiting for a cure
Like death

And one last breath
Felt in the night
He wished to be his last
He couldn't hold on
To this madness, so
Like death

There was this glimmer
A ray of light
The suffering might end
Things could go right
Maybe slowly
Like death

The world was healing
Not all hope was dead
The once confined bodies
Will rise out of bed
Defeating tragedies
Like death

With a combined might
And hope alight
Strength in prayer
And hearts twinned
The world rose up
From death.

The Lingering and the Unconsoled Heart
by Michael R. Burch

There is a silence—
the last unspoken moment
before death,

when the moon,
cratered and broken,
is all madness and light,

when the breath comes low and complaining,
and the heart is a ruin
of emptiness and night.

There is a grief—
the grief of a lover's embrace
while faith still shimmers in a mother’s tears ...

There is no gruesomer time, nor place,
while the faint glimmer of life is ours
that the lingering and the unconsoled heart fears

beyond this: seeing its own stricken face
in eyes that drift toward some incomprehensible place.

Keywords/Tags: lingering, unconsoled, heart, death, bed, deathbed, silence, last, rites, hospice, eternity, finality, infinity, grave