death comes
each evening to chat
billowing robes
ashen skull hidden
in the shadowed cowl
she got my letters
and on the nights
i don’t feel up
to conversing
she reads them to me
always starting with
the ones written
in waxy crayon
the innocent ones
begging for an ending
to the special lessons
designed to remove
the devil from my heart
the melodrama of
teenage hormones and
the first hints of
my hyperbolic mind
they read less like
pleading missives
and the dawning of
understanding on what
this life will truly be
to the sloppy demands
of burgeoning bipolarity
showing how little
about myself i knew
she has reams of them
our nightly chats
transcribed into a
journal of winsome rage
decrying god, country, and
the listless embrace of
dead lovers who were
far more fetching to
the grim spectre of demise
neither of us admitting
that these late night
conversations are as
close to normal as
either of us ever get
as she mocks my cries
refusing to take me
until i have suffered
to the extent she demands
her cold bony fingers
tracing my petulant lips
teasing by pulling
my soul just far enough
from the mortal coil
to give a hint of the
grand nothingness waiting
just beyond the veil of
inconsolable living
reading my desperations
with a certain dry humor
that shows just about
how meaningless it all is
bedtime stories for
the insomnial dreamer
in the darkness where
it is only death and i