Mortis Poems | Examples


List of Member Poems

Symphonia Mortis

Dear Olivia,

In the meadow’d yards of
Cherish’d eternity,
The pines softly wisp away
Unto the fading breeze,
Awaiting humm’d melodies
Seldom heard in grace.

In the mellow’d streets of
Tarnish’d mortality, 
Your letters rest in stillness
Upon the evening’s florid dream,
Where bloodied angels sing:
‘My god has forsaken me!
My god has forsaken me.’

You must be lonely dear, –
I must be foolish too, –
Life is tender,
But death is ever sweeter
Upon a passing moon.

Premium Member Candor Mortis

My autopsy room is a confessional, 
where killers in absentia divulge 
their sins through bodies
rigid and frigid, mutilated and mute.

Graffiti of abrasions, contusions and lacerations
reenact without deceit or reservations
a catalogue of perversions and violations.

Rage, hatred, greed, jealousy, sickness 
explode and leave behind vandalized anatomies, 
a *********** of naked emotions
in the topography of vacated husks.

Silently, they talk.
With my eyes, I listen.  

They confide in me about themselves too,
these chatty cadavers, 
about their public faces and private hell.

Tattoos speak of loves and obsessions, 
silicone breasts betray insecurities, 
medications reveal internal insurgencies, 
needle marks give away muffled screams,  
cirrhosis lets on alcoholic dreams. 

A hundred foibles preserved by the 
candor of rigor mortis, 
each corpse an abridged, 
unfinished biography. 

By the end of their final confessions, the departed
have parted with their burdens of secrets.  

In death much more than in life, 
there is honesty. 

Still, I take comfort in the lies of the living.

Rex Angulus Mortis

My veins now spill forth scarlet waters,
Rent by serrated silver teeth.
Like Her breast sinewed all life,
Fervoured my wrist, when She jilted me...
Repleted by once Her love;
Now became Death, a nocturnal drapery...
"My Goddess What didst Thou to me,
Lust priapic to Thine ardent ****?''
A sylph bewinged like an Angel,
That withered love infected me...
A morbid plume falling from grace,
The celestial eye ebonied.
"My Love; Doth thou not want me?
Hath I becometh a Daemon?"
... 

No... 
this blooded brine, mortal wine,
this etch on my pale canvas.
is nothing more but a single sign,
To pain's anathema,
-yet you my love...
Will nascent from my blood,
and be robed in ether cardinal...

My suicide, although it's sin
Will leave you happy with akin.
My body was a tumour around my soul,
but waning life, will take control...


Rigor Mortis - Tanka

my death is so slow!...
its footsteps mark my seconds,
its breath veils my heart...
behold, with its frozen eyes
has touched the words between us...

Rigor Mortis

The Madness Continues

Rigid as steel he sleeps, stiff and lifeless,  
Inert, a shell of a man who liked to laugh.  
Gone through the valley of death him who   
Once was filled with much capacity to love.  
Rest in peace, brother, whoever you are.   

More of the same will most certainly ensue      
Out in the harsh, unforgiving desert sands.
Rue the day when leaders set forth agenda  
To pursue wily enemies with phantom WMD.   
In the mortuary a chaplain kneels in prayer,
Soldier takes his last, long journey home.

Rigor Mortis

I must have died,
but when -- I don't recall.
Some year, some day,
some crucial moment
came and went unnoticed,
upstaged, perhaps,
by a grocery list
or too-tight shoes.
A quiet time later, though,
when the world was out to lunch,
I thought of you -- 
and nothing happened.
No sprangling pain
felt keenest in the palms,
no paucity of breath,
no gallop in the veins.
Instead -- surprise,
a leaning toward regret,
then numbness all.
Still, I might a Lazarus prove
to word of yours -- 
but lacking that,
what wants of dying now
is just the public part.


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