I pray for the spirit of those who have gone before me,
but whose birthdays were after mine.
Oh, for the privilege of time being linear.
Yet for us, it is a helical obituary.
We put one foot in front of the other.
One step: we nap on Granny’s couch,
Faster: we play in the park,
And faster: we walk to the corner store.
But as we lift our foot to make another lunge forward,
we’re snatched by our ankles
and dragged back into the six-foot abyss we thought we crawled out of.
We dust Death off just to meet him again.
We dust him off, and meet him again