Notions Of Mortality Poem by Eddie Roa

My cousin Del was obsessed by death

Saw maggots playing on tattered shrouds

And scattered rib cages topped by meatless skulls

Feigning smiles to those who looked

Tulip blooms growing from the eye holes

Searching intently at a seemingly infinite sky

Relishing morbid scene after morbid scene

Enjoying the thought of lying in state

Amidst mourning kin and friends

A moment of recognition to be seized

A time to be honored and praised, no matter

Dispel the fear to be hollow of bone,

The dreaded loneliness of insensate existence,

The hardness of the fleshless,

The disconsolation of the ungrieved