Summary: Sometimes I'm aware of what's inside--I walk around in aging skin and suddenly it seems I'm socket-eyed, a thing of bones, a creaking Halloween skeleton whose flesh is shed.#BR##BR#Alas, I'm Yorick or some other skull no one talks to, or a heap of calcium too ancient to appall deep in a Catacomb where beetles creep and rats squeak on a seeping wall.#BR##BR#Or maybe in a classroom there I am teaching tomorrow's medics what, with toothy mandible and ilium, coccyx, sacrum, pubis, shoulder joint, remains when all is said and done.#BR##BR#My rattling ribs will be a xylophone, my radius could beat a drum, my underface might grace a tube of poison--Beware Beware or here's what you'll become, a ghoul that's not like anyone, which you will anyway some now or then, as if your body's sunken down and down and down and drowning in a fen until what's left of you can't smile or frown but only shows a gruesome grin.#BR##BR#Poe's Red Death that's dancing in a mask, if fleshless vertebras could dance, you'll be a thing past slow or fast, a symbol of the innerness that haunts us even when we're at our best.#BR##BR#I'm not yet in a closet chained and swaying or snowy in the desert heat; though such grim images may be dismaying, as long as my unquiet heart can beat I'll fight the thought that I'm decaying.#BR##BR#Amen, so be it, let the music vary from somber tunes by Baudelaire to livelier airs by Ray Bradbury, who knows the score but doesn't quite despair--much horror is imaginary.#BR##BR#
