It had always been your choice
this type of falling
away from your friends and family.
Not even gravity could have pulled you further.
And between the ties of the lunge and the fall,
there was silence, and a growing number
of people, their hands clenched to fist,
mouths open exchanging breaths of life,
and your tousled hair among crushed sprays
of santan and sampaguita.
Pablo Neruda was right to say that death sweeps
us like broomsticks, collecting some of us
in bulks, as we join the weights of mammoths
that have long since passed into extinction.
The earth is one less soul-heavy now,
all mourning and mawkish. The women should
have known better than to sing at funerals
because it wakes the dead in their slumber.
And one must know the dead should not be stirred.
How suddenly, over an afterthought, it had all come
naturally that Death would fetch you in your bed
because you have summoned upon him.
Now, everything else is a desire for respite,
for one son joining his father, and one mother
all soaked up in sweat and shaking in her sleep.
Notice how your friends in their purest clothes cry:
How it had all come to this.
Your embalmed face basks in the dry moon
shining its artificial light on you.
But that is just one way of looking at it.
