(no subject)

[proximoception]

That phrase "the skull beneath the skin"
Reminds us that a skeleton
Not only stands for being done,
But also Death, the doer-in.

It's that that skin is ours that's grim;
From within he comes, the Reaper:
Each of us his own end's keeper.
Skin can't hide that we are him.

Though also not. A skull's a seat
And we're what sits there. We're the skin.
Bone's the soil where begin
Those growths that put the me in meat.

All stems from him, all goes back,
But nonetheless he stays a stranger.
Life-possessed one, you're the change:
A ripple on a fade to black.

Comments

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Fantastic.

There's a Jack Finney Ray Bradbury story I read when I was about 9 about a guy who takes up a mountebank's offer to have his skeleton removed, so that he doesn't have to think he's walking around with a skeleton inside him. It's a good horror story, one of the first places where I saw how a last line can be great, and can do the work that you (the reader) were expecting the narrative to do.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Scooped! So to speak.

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Well, by Eliot/Webster/P.D. James, not Bradbury. And yes, "so to speak." But the point is what you scooped out of them!

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

The vacancy beneath the skull
Is all I've scooped from them, man. Pish!
'Tis spineless as a jellyfish.
The killer's named in line 6. Dull!

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

Like the rhyming. So apropos this Reaper, too, on Tomahawk missile day.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Someone get the truck. Someone fucking bring him the truck again.