I Know A Man Who Writes As An Expert On Death

I know a man who writes as an expert about death.

He majors on the moment that follows a final breath.

Morbid news attracts him---he is quite the lurking ghoul.

Announcements of death are all that can raise his flaccid tool.

Funerals and crowded graveyards are, to him, an entire culture:

he hovers around them like some kind of ravenous vulture.

His words usually contain numerous banalities:

some of which are almost comic for their tomfooleries.

his dull mind sharpens only to the glaringly obvious.

Toward certain deaths, his words erupt in a spew quite volcanic;

but he only knows a couple of cacphonic riffs.

He likes to imagine the multitude of frozen, or freezing, stiffs

bobbing in cold water in the wake of the Titanic.

His whiole existence, as he has lived it, is entirely superflous.


Starward




Author's Notes/Comments: 

No one you know, although I am sure there is one just like him in every town or village that has a funeral home or a newspaper.

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lyrycsyntyme's picture

Excellent

Boy, the imagery in the final two lines was surreal and really got me. It really encapsulates the dark pleasure one who fits this bill might partake in. 

 

Per your postscript, I do believe that persons of this sort do indeed find their way into positions where they can get closer to both touching and expressing such pleasures.

 

As another reader said, this was quite unique a subject.

S74rw4rd's picture

Thanks for visiting the poem,

Thanks for visiting the poem, and for commenting.  I am glad you enjoyed the last lines---which were not actually the way I had intended to end it, but when the Titanic sailed in, I had not choice.  (I am somewhat haunted by that tragic ship:  some of my mother's Irish relatives were employed in its construction, as well as other ships too.)


Starward

ramonathompsont's picture

very very good. different. I

very very good. different. I like it

S74rw4rd's picture

Thank you very much for

Thank you very much for reading the poem and commenting.


Starward