Best Mortem Poems

Post Mortem by David Lustrup 2011

Here I lay....dead
Icy ,black, thick blood, motionless in my veins
Yet i see from my eyes.
Numbness, this world of grey.

I hear the sound of birds wings--scratching, fluttering, playing in reverse.
I lay in rigor, the world goes by in scattered frames.
And the...

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One day for sure our life must end
as we depart from foe or friend, 
from pain or strife, despair or joy
our body just a broken toy. 

While friends all weep and foes rejoice
will we then listen to their voice 
and wonder why we are not...

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Post Mortem

  Did you hear them sing dirge:
  When the world comes crashing down on me,
  Did you hear those voices across the divide?
  A cacophony of tormented brain
  All dead and moldy like forgotten bread,
  Dust to dust,
...

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Yes, death has always been a joke
That wise ones play on lesser folk,
And childlike eyes around campfire
Grow wide as fiction’s fake desire
Invokes a poetry of fear
That truly clouds the atmosphere,
For even fools can mount a tale
Where facts can’t make the story stale.

Oh sure we’ve all...

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What was this unarticulated joy 
that beat inside my chest? 
That which was expected and is past
reflected numens chanting to my spirit, 
as if subdivided in my superconsciousness,
I may not bear them as a whole 
though holy they may be...
one mystery selects a lifetime as...

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post-mortem note to mr. eliot

dearest thomas,
having lived long enough to see the
a-bomb drop, one wonders if you had
rethought your infamous ending 
to “The Hollow Men,”
for most certainly
the world will not go with a 
whimper,
we would be so lucky
to be rolled up in the fetus position
down...

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Man fears time
That’s why we waste it
We keep running against time
‘Cause we know we can’t chase it..

Why  do we keep waiting
For something that’s never there?
Instead of just accepting
The truth no matter how unfair?

Until the damage is done
And there’s no place to go
When the weeping...

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twisted chains in the very fabric of their existence...
come join in the resistance
shattered glass out on the patio
vanished corpse out of thin air
in peril the vortex shimmers at the call of nature
strangled by fragments of false decorum
we left a sign out in the parchment area
having...

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We are what we do;
we are what we say

As day becomes night,
and night becomes day

We are twice begotten; 
we are twice betrayed

Forgiveness in hiding
—redemption misplayed 

(West Philadelphia: February, 2020)...

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Sic semper evello mortem tyrannis, high bred poiet?s of mine

     ("Thus always I cause the death of tyrants.”)
the purported line Brutus uttered 
after assassinating Julius Caesar.

     Alternatively titled:
The prose and consequential arguments 
for the death penalty.

 ...

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Their hands glide across his skin like death
The coolness of hands, without emotion, felt by none
'It burns, it freezes, it hurts so much, make it stop'
Is what he would say had he one breath of life left
Instead he lays there with a slack, stone cold...

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  After poor old Mortimer was dead

    by his grave ~ a flowerbed...

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Distant melancholic music plays.
Dead flowers swoon and sway
In the molten breeze of an August afternoon.
Colors lost too soon,
Faded and forsaken by the relentless beat
Of an angry sun.
Forlorn and forgotten by the living,
Sight and scent no longer giving pleasure
To jaded eyes ever longing
For the newness of...

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-Only a Poet-
is envious of the dead

(Amtrak R5: June, 2021)...

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Highlight of Goofus and Gallant 
bred within the survival instinct 
of hungry hordes of prey, 
when Earth in the balance 
against an uncomfortable truth 
smug smurf like scavengers. 

     Punishment meted out 
and limited by the poison 
yielded courtesy iron maiden...

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