Originally posted 8/17/2012.

What horror you leave behind —
your cold face
colder than it is now;  
the cooling mess they pull from the sheets,
the colder one they put in the ground;
the grief on your loved ones’ lips,
the pain through which they’ll whistle every word
for a long time;  

those things don’t concern you at all,
do they?

The way you see it,
a longing for death 
is a form of hope
that the disaster of your last moments
and whatever follows them
will be so different from one another
that the latter will make up
for your lifelong slide into the former.