As Infections Become Ghostly Rehearsals

A coward dies a thousand deaths,
the brave but once  —Earnest Hemingway

 

2002, it was a rare suffocating Ludwig’s
Angina left me near death on a table
& then to hover above a surgeon’s fangs.

Maybe vampires and afterlives are real—
wait, let me tell you only what I know:
blood splatter & a breath snapped me

back, into a deflated body, to suck in
air  through a tube in a hole in my throat.
This coward died his thousand times

in only ten days—please tell me how
the brave manage to die only once
at a Jamaica Queens Hospital for marginals.

2022, I thought about dying in a hospital
from a Covid that invaded my old lungs
& left me stuck in bed for a month.

I missed howling at January’s full moon
with a pack of grey wolves of my dreams
& had to accept another ghostly rehearsal—

prompting not to expect a dead father,
or live son, passed mother, or live daughter
to catch my last words & redemption.

 

 

 

Peace,
Andrés