Rigor mortis

The heart is the tallest in the
body, exceeds the bones and roams
beyond the pasture of the skin and

the throat is a pit with hot coals burning,
steams the tongue while talking and still
tastes familial fume

The hands are the eyes of the arms and
they are sometimes unseeing, sometimes
tensing with a premature demise or
bended at the knuckles like a crashing grave

Part and curtained, to pass through the
ruins of unliving, undoing like a bloomed bud
falling back into the husk of itself,

scabbing like the bare parcels of earth,
scorched as if discomforted by an all-
engulfing flame, the land is scarred and

defected with wounds upon wounds with
blood that even bleeds, with bruise that
continues to blemish in a cursed stirring

Rigor mortis and the eyes that lie behind the
eyes, rigor mortis and the veins that burrow
above and away from the skin, rigor mortis
and the mind that is entombed in a century of dying

Rigor mortis and existing
both alive and deceased