Is death a thing that can repeat,
recur—happen again?
Or is each death unlike before?
Unlike and never same?
Are we bound universal by death?
Is death something we share?
I think perhaps that death is not
a seam that all shall wear.
This is not to say that some won’t die,
they will—but the twining
thread that stitches body and word
in corpus, the twinning
of a human is so singular
that when it comes undone,
when it becomes a corpse—
death the word is too dumb
and universal in noun and name.
All shall die. But death?
There is no such thing. A person
that ceases to have breath—
they have died. But there is no death.
Every death is singular—
unequivocal in the loss
of one in particular.
There is no death, only the dying.
There is only someone’s
death—a dispossession possessed
by a person undone.
This poem was originally published on Nichola's Substack.