Five years old again, lost in
darkness
parents and brothers call
from the other side of the stream,
"Richard, Richard!" He tries to
reach them. Hands lunge in the dark.
Each one says, "Take me.
I’ll pull you across."
Just as he touches his
father’s fingers
he is sucked back into a hole
and falls down, down, down, down.
His seventy-five-years-old
emaciated body
stretches out -- a
long white ribbon
under the sheet.
Faces hover. "I thought he
was gone."
"His heart did stop."
A prisoner in this clean,
well-lit hell
constantly attacked by white-clad,
grim-faced devils with needles, pills,
tubes, enemas, robbing him of dignity,
they don’t understand
when he talks to people on the
walls and ceiling,
refuses food and pills, has accidents
and mostly longs for the other side.
