Final Moments

I awaken, alarmed by contagion’s dread, by the advancing bubonic omen. My muscular spasms unleash, involuntarily. My astonished malediction yawns, cavernous. I gawk vacantly in my remaining moments, at icy stones beneath my trembling feet. Just a prisoner, I conclude. Just an incorrigible coward. Inconsolable, impotent, lachrymose, I await my execution. My penalty decreed in infectious agent. My sentence prescribed in replicating pathogen. Cacophonous are my incessant night terrors, allying insomnia with somnambulism, compounding calamity with conception. No redemption in these ranting forecasts. But I cannot reduce the fever. And raving violence only deepens. Yet, when capacity breathes hush in my channel, I close my eyes. Letting go is migrating sentience. I am the silent release departing. With my interior eye of providence, I verify the amber brilliance, this luz de Amarillo, The Quaker’s inner light. The Hindu’s moksha. The Shaker’s simple gifts. The Buddha’s luminous mind. Dimensionless. Breathing again, radiant rapture quenching. Breathing again, from the riverbank, watching mortal suffering float by. And in Yoga, the knots of trauma dispel from my vertebrate. My spinal lesson, the simplest song for which I find no words. My lives and deaths are passing weather systems. Forbearance offers pristine extinction.