In the seminal terminal moment
lay my withered bag down
on the steps climbing to halls of power.

Let those there living in padded seat
with high back chair
watch

as I die.

In my jaundiced skin let them see
what has been long ignored as they
walk by unaffected, bored
forward in their dash toward
more campaign cash.

Let that dying body
even after death remain,
reminding them
of all platitudes of compassion
they spoke covering
truth with stink and stain.

Let my corrupted and cancerous
bag of flesh
sit on those marble steps;
fat lawyers and lawmakers passing,
not noticing nor caring,
move by, uninterrupted to their
congress of the conniving;
in sure ants paying back, amassing
with my death being
their holy dollar bequest
given them by a miserly master
more concerned with the money earned
than the life I’m losing when lost to the mystic.

They weal deny
with a cry: “statistic!”
with a gallows gavel banged
the speaker shouts “case adjourned!
remove the carcass, let compassion be hanged.”

And when my last breath has come and gone
and I finally willingly greet my brother death,
whom I fear no more, I fear him even less
for he will freely give me pain’s release
from the illness they could have ceased,
with a simple pen slash, to be no more.

Thy reaper dear, you are kinder to me
than the money making human whore
who would not, will not,
profit defray for a dying delay;
believing the pile of our misery
increases the power that wields the might.

Let and allow my dead body be long in sight
on capitol steps, rainbowing from blue to gray,
be the symbol of the corrupt rule’s shining day,
for I will need it not again during the short dark night.

Let the decaying, rotting, smelling,
uninsured, uncounted thing sit unmolested
in death uncontested
as a sign of a life lived
and once embraced,

as the image of the heaps of scorn,
that legalizing prostitutes legislated,

raced and piled on the people
rendered down,
our usefulness for profit outworn.