Raindrops like a thousand liquid sins
Fall cold and dampen living ground
As friends die miles away
Without a loving hug or smile
And an uncle lies in a hospital bed
In the twilight of a coma’s sleep
His life counted by ticks of a clock

The ways and means of living sap
The eternal energy’s ebb and flow
In hourly increments, meant to depersonalize
dehumanize, teaching the humility of failure.
The meaning of life lost in countless
Hours of paperwork and bullshit
while the real world is spinning
out of control as it always does
and always will.

Life and death
balanced on the point of a pen
babies born, elders die, friends
lose themselves in emotional rhetoric
and still the pen goes on, and on
writing the story that is fantasy
without the warmth of blood.

The kinship of life, and
The pearl of death, shine into
The darkness, almost as appealing
As living with the rat-race
Tears, a thousand liquid sins
Fill the well with sorrows
And do not nourish the soul