Life and Death

What it is to be dead
And still walking,
Still viable.
You cannot see
My breath but it is there-
Still rhythmic, stark and bare
And walking,
For I am the walking dead.

I pass the river- calm, unruptured
And my body the aperture
Of such a still-
And what a silence,
Its semblance to kill
As I sink.
The line no longer querulous
Upon the screen-
No longer blue nor growing green.

Life continues now, me dead
The sand still itchy above my head
Where are the fish?
They too insane?
By modern grasp and modern claim
Our rods and hooks wrought in vain?
No epitaph crowns their head
No bluish blood when mine is red,
Seeps from garish corpses.
From here they look permeable,
Perhaps because their lips they stress,
And death they caress as though
Life was more valuable.

Life- inflated as a balloon
Energetic and crimson-
Yet, wait, just wait,
Until oxygen itself deprive,
And then I am still-
Neither dead nor alive.