Weekly Short Stories Contest and Company! discussion

You have until March 31 to post a poem, and from April 1-7 we’ll vote for which one we thought was best!

Please post directly into the topic and not a link. Please don’t use a poem previously used in this group. Only one submission per person is allowed.

Your poem can be any length.

This week’s topic is: Postmortem.

The rules are pretty loose. You could write a poem about anything that has to do with the subject/photo but it must relate to the topic somehow.

Most of all have fun!

Interesting topic! And this allows me to be very lazy and post an old poem. M might remember it. It was not posted in this group before. (I checked and was surprised that the within group search is actually very good.) It fits the topic in an interesting way.

Cotton for Comfort

I
The cadaver wanted to signal the world
that the remains of the she
she once was was not all that she was!
But her tongue remained still, thoughts stillborn
under the weight of entomological entropy.

The cadaver remembered
all her apprehensions, understandings
and now even their misses. All of them.
Misses. Missus. Masses. Mass. Mas. Maws. Mauls. Mulls.
Mulligans! Now that is a great word!
Missed. Mist. Miss. Misses.
Where's the mulligan?

The cadaver wondered
at the state of her body.
It would seem, by the sights
she couldn't see, and the sounds
she couldn't hear, that she had been abandoned
somewhere wild, wild where the wild things are.
Where the wild things were returning
her once complex interleaving of molecules and cells,
with a macabre dance,
to the more natural chord of thrumming humming humus.
Humus! Hum Us. Humour Us. Humorous!

She wondered that she could hear
that chthonic humming
now that she couldn't hear words
that chimed charmingly
with an importance she could no longer fashion.
Fashion?
She began to soundlessly laugh
at being alive in vain.

Vain. Vanity. Inanity. Insanity.
She'd left that morning wearing her badly worn,
tired and holey underwear,
underwear her mother told her
not to be seen dead in,
but in which she felt natural.
Nature all. All Nature. All Natural.
Cotton for comfort. Comport. Come apart.
Be apart. Be a part of. Be a part of wordlessness.

II
It was my mother who identified me.
Not by my remains,
For the little that remained of me
was comprised of the natural white anonymity of fleshless bones.
Sex, once curvaceous and vibrant and fetid
had become a dry geometric puzzle,
the curve of the pelvic girdle and coccyx
the sere mystery of skull and bone density,
agéd clues in de-gummed teeth and voided cranial sutures.

It was by my clothes,
the clothes I'd been killed in,
the made of comfortable cotton clothes
that so affronted my mother's sense of social propriety,
that became the means of my escape from the unmarked grave
of an anonymous de-animation.

There were tears.
But …
How to say this? The tears were not for me, now,
but for the simulacrum of a corpulent me that once appeared to exist in the mind's eye,
the giddy distracted mind for the gaudy embodied me I once dizzily revelled in.
Or, at least that's what I'd like to think I want to remember,
to be remembered by
by the strangers I was bound to by the soft
pillowy cotton delicate strings,
designed by and dedicated to the social obligation of family stones.
Stones? How to explain this weight?
In so far as my skeleton is sensate,
I feel compelled to embrace Sei Shonagon's The Pillow Book * cants
and list my listlessness as follows:
cross bones, tomb stones,
head stones, hearth stones, heart stones.
Cajones, nerve, verve.
Vicissitude.

In the morgue I rest, un-rued on cold rude un-stained steel,
pillowed by the dead sure attitude found solely
in an unremarked gravestone, wet from an unexpected cloudburst,
and in the lost certitude of my lonesome anonymity.


*Note: The Pillow Book has been called a book of lists because Sei Shonagon included lists of all kinds. And it has some great and quotable observations, such as:

In life there are two things which are dependable. The pleasures of the flesh and the pleasures of literature.

—Sei Shonagon circa 1000 AD

POET: Garrison Kelly
TITLE: Barbarian Tears
GENRE: Traditional Poetry
RATING: PG for violence



When the demon inside reaches postmortem status
When the time comes to lay down your blood-soaked axes
When your war cry to the heavens is only a whimper
When your tree-trunk legs get limper and limper

Let the river of salt flow freely from your eyes
Let your inner war hammer crush Manosphere lies
Let your war-torn soul cycle through the emotions
So you don’t live day to day going through the motions

There’s nothing wrong with crying, regardless of gender
When you’ve spent so long being the strongest protector
When your deadliest attackers pass the gates of hell
When the smell of death leaves you nauseous and unwell

There’s no such thing as never-ending strength
There’s no such thing as a limited time length
When the burden you carry lives on forever
Unleash the thunderstorms and waterfall weather

The monsters and tyrants will laugh as much as they want
Even they have empty souls behind the violence they flaunt
Someday they will learn what vulnerability means
Even if their abusers never passed on those genes

Nobody leaves this life without a festering wound
That eats away at the flesh before they enter the tomb
That eats away at the mind like disease-carrying rats
The scars never get better, they only grow fat

Don’t take your pain to the other side of life
Don’t bottle the trauma that cuts like a knife
Your tears will grow the most beautiful plants
Leave behind a greener world when others can’t

You won’t be remembered as a laughing stock jester
But they’ll be remembered as angel molesters
You’ll be treated like a god for generations to come
Leave a legacy of love with your trail of blood

Very good, Garrison!

Glum
By Brett A. Starr on March 18, 2023

Feeling full of glum
Accompanied by boredom
Comfort post mortem


Footnote: A depressive message when one feels so low that suicide is actually appealing. 18 years have passed since my last severe depression. I remember it still today. It felt like there was no hope.

Thanks, Brett! I like yours too. Struggling with mental illness and suicidal ideation is a familiar feeling, for sure. In any event, I'm glad you're still with us, buddy.