Tag: death

“If only things had turned out differently, 
this time,” he thinks, undone now by flying.
His mind’s archives change to melody. They 
scream a vapid, sentimental song of 
mayhem in the air that, from down here,
is just a smudge and smoky curlicue. 
The old, Austrian seer foretold that death 
is the subjunctive of our very being. 
Our birdman, he grasps it now and succumbs 
to that truth’s sting—his personal pain. 
In chapels spanning every longitude 
of its vast motherland, his public hear 
the solemn knell that tolls his passing hour. 

Peasants, scholars, drivers on the roads begin 
to capture his descent on mobile phones. 
They see it for what it is … proof of life,
descending earthward, flames. They take a pause.
The savage boar and all his clan are dead.
These simple folk believe this life’s no more 
than a trip to a zoo, where animals 
root in the dirt and fling their shit about. 
They thought there was no end to their decline, 
no respite. Then, a man falls from the sky
into his grave, and proves the zoo is ours 
to leave. And governments, disasters, wars, 
simply, but sometimes by chance, always end.