Excerpted from I'M DEAD—Osiris

The cadaver horizon is a mountainscape
that spreads from my eyebrows across the world
spanning outward evermore,
for death is everpresent within everpresent life,
and so it is not purely chaotic
to see in my death the death of all
and within that all
a nothingness some would call a void,
but which upon closer inspection reveals but another me dreaming it,
the dream and me…
life within the cadaver is the promise blossom
awaiting blown seedlings to scuttle across the desert
of a once rain forest
under the glacial ice’s memory of millennia,
is a world tree,
a stately scented sycamore…
If plants waited to expand because another glacier were coming,
then all would be desert or ice.
Nonetheless, we are all a carnival dressed for funerals
and upon our pyres we dance
the macabre cadaver dance
regardless of peregrination
chosen as a soul before entrance to the dance,
despite our willingness to unwillingness
to comprehend the choices now,
we yet journey.
Dying each day,
stinking and rotting,
and living each day,
fragrantly renewing,
leaving stenches intermixed with aromas of beauteous sorts.
No poem is a poem as self identified,
or self unidentified,
for in its own recognition or dismissal
does it fail as such or its antithesis.
So, call this nothing, but read it deeply…
And, what of a life pretending to be dead then?
Does death pretend and feign so readily life?
Is a wound but death making light of life?
Wounds heal and reopen,
countless times in a moment,
scarring providing us skin
and tissue
memories to jolt physicality back into psychology,
as if we need to recall and cannot without their assistance.
A wound in unthought fields of chaos reels
over black flowers
dotting ever-steeper valleys and ever-lower hills,
bleeding black flowers with heady stenchy odors
wafting warily nearer and further
from until surrounding all Osiris
emerges
reborn from Isis’ chaotic womb…
the glacier but a memory
of her moonlight fading
in the unconsciousness
of Osiris’ dead memories.
The memory returns,
now a rememory:
Osiris is the sycamore,
is the plants reborn out of a desert or tundrascape,
is the sun born from the moon each day,
is the cadaver horizon,
is the life carnival,
is all of life and death
one arising out of the other…