Where is the line betwixt alive and dead?

Is it dormant or of a moving tongue?

“I speak, it lives” is what the old priest said.

Offense taken as childhood is stung.

Can we rip out its living-breathing heart,

and sop with crusts its ever-purging bones?

Or melt our teeth and revert from the start,

A new set of pictures upon the stones.

And yet the gravestones still remain as flat

As if to cry that they will never change.

How still and cold as broken vial cat,

Put down the ruins to cleanse the verbal mange.

The dead: bed-sheets that ever stay the same.

Only through birth can we attain new fame.