My Rigor Mortis Poem by Patti Masterman

My rigor mortis is never mentioned
Anymore at parties;
I stick myself to one wall, mothlike
And the conversation goes on all around me,
As though nothing were out of the ordinary.

Though sometimes I do stiffen up
A little too much, and then a dolly is required
To remove me at evening's end;
But at least I am at full length then
And not curled up like a pretzel.

Complications are bound to arise:
It becomes harder to speak each day
As my brain is disengaged
Within my corpus, from profundity-
It's unhappy, that writing is out of the question.

When curious strangers ask
How I came to be in such a condition,
My family finds it difficult to answer
Because I started out like everyone else
But then increasingly came to deny my own existence

As an act of random cruelty,
By a creator at the mercy of whim:
If life made any sense at all, we would begin as rotting corpse
And slowly retrograde, all the way back to babyhood;
And die drooling and gurgling,
While smelling very sweetly-
And die without a care.