Quality of Life
Sight, hearing, smell, and taste
Tell you that touch is in the fight of its life,
Forced, as it is, to carry all the compensatory weight,
For the other four senses, which, mysteriously, have disappeared,
During the past five years of your flesh's degradation.
All you know is that, in this quasi-vegetative state,
Your functions, routines, preoccupations, processes
Center around consuming everything your fingers can locate,
Groping without and under, high and over, low and within,
Eating whatever your black, cracking teeth can masticate.
At times of most trenchant, deepest despair, you pray for release,
Dream of being set free, on the breeze,
So that you might float like a dust-to-dust mote,
Not even needing to reach beyond your feeble resources,
And let the air bury you, in its cemetery, everywhere, forever.
12/16/10 - (1)
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