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vigil
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After Death i see you in your pain
making life look like death itself
take my vital force from me
and use it on yourself
i watch you rely on intermittent help
while care follows a rigorous schedule
and such trivial things as life and death
are marked by potato chips and pamphlets
some angel donated an extra room
where hundreds congregate
so they don't have to watch you
take your hundredth dose of dilaudid.
i watch you ease away from us
like a friend with somewhere better to go
inching toward the back door
speaking in euphemisms.
i spend my time in the extra room.
some donor is as heartless as i.
thank god for places away from the ones we love.
and dilaudid. thank god for dilaudid.
To me this poem is soused
To me this poem is soused with gloom, lethality and near pending demise. It is an interesting read; then again, I love Dostoyevsky, Camus, Kafka and Sartre. It feels like an existential bereavement. I think the hydromorphone references are their own euphemisms. They make the poem sound expiry and mortally fatal. It is reminiscent of a hospice situation; watching someone drift away helplessly under the twinge of administered numbness. Those on the sidelines are left to deal with their own sorrows, agony and grief. Surveillance caught defenselessly in the throes of pain, remorse, ambivalence, heartache, and prayers – perhaps – that wish the situations of the past, and stinging thoughts in the present moment could somehow be different. Sad poem, but well worth the recital and contemplation.
you are exactly right. it's
you are exactly right. it's about my grandmother in hospice.