POETRY

When I die

A sonnet

Photo by Moritz Schumacher on Unsplash

~after Claude McKay

When I die, let me drift easy from your mind,
do not cling and clamor for my absent words.
Ghosts speak quiet fortunes of unheard rhymes,
I’d rather find myself reborn in a flock of birds.
When I die, I hope it comes in the form of sleep,
that I’m here one moment, and the next I’m gone.
I’d rather not tire, treading water so deep,
not knowing when the final card is drawn.
But so many now meet that common end,
the cannibal that grows in the gut or the bones,
so many get devoured by that demon within,
riding morphine drip through black sea moans.
If it awakes in me, let me die by my own means,
I’d rather not succumb to the dull teeth of disease.