Dead Men's Poems

There’s something about a dead man’s poems
That makes you feel his death,
Or, the many times he died along the way.
And if you don’t try to feel it much,
It slips up on you in the night,
And suffocates the frivolity of your dreams.
Then you can smell the stories plot,
And taste the salt of sweat and blood,
And wonder that you couldn’t sympathize
While he stumbled the land of the living—
While he cried in the solemn light of day.
 
-jenn long