To the Art of Lady Lazarus

My acceptance of death is temporary:
It comes and goes like a tide and the
Mind is a fugitive, its back flashing
With an electrical buzz
At the sunburnt Goli-Otok.

Like a fish crying silver sun ripples
At the freedom that it learned to cherish
With more than just the empty
Water balloon soul
Is the mind alive.

To reason with the ocean is to lose
For it will run you over in a day and
Silence under its massive plump sides
The high-strung thread
Of virtuous vibrations.

I see no art in death, perhaps just
In the very art of dying: the grandiose
Of performance skill, the way you
Hype the public up
And trod the stage

With enviable self-importance.
Even a two-by-two dead city dirty
Bar loo with fluorescent bloody light
May be the screen
Of your million-dollar debut.

But yet my rapture does not lie in the
Anxious anticipation of a single step
That is, by far, the least remarkable
Achievement. The process
Is the masterpiece,

Though ones the most remembered
Are laughable and bloated blue.
I have but a few little hours of sleep;
Each a mouse’s step
Across the carpet.

Yet every centimeter of skin adheres
Magnetically, pulsing with eager
Feeling of being alive on a continued
Flowing thread
From none to none —

That is the art and art is purpose,
Inciting fear of immobility and sleep,
Of airless breath, of being bogged in
Whale oil of the
Unforgiving time.

The present of my own thought is
Now the product of a past, a gallery
Of visions that survive on human air.
My acceptance of
Death is temporary.