The Grave

David Park Barnitz

The loathed worms are crawling over me
     All the dead hours; about my buried head
     Their soft intolerable mouths are gathered,
And in my dead eyes that have ceas'd to see.
I am full of worms and rotten utterly,
     Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead,dead.

The lifeless earth lies close against mine eyes;
     I know that I have rotted long ago;
     My limbs are made one with the worms I know
Where all my head and body putrifies.
So in the earth my coffin'd ordure lies
     Within my loathed shambles strait and low.

There is no thing now where my face hath been,
     And all my flesh lies soft upon the floor;
     Unto my heart the worms have found a door,
And all my body is to the worms akin;
They long time since their feasting did begin,
     And they shall part not from me evermore.

Here lie I stretch'd out through the rotting years,
     And I am surely weary of the grave,
     And I have sometimes thought that I might rave,
And my two perish'd eyes almost shed tears.
There is no one that sees and none that hears;
     I shall not out from my corrupted cave.

Here now forever with the lustful worms
     I lie within my putrid sunken sty,
     And through eternity my soul shall die.
O thou toward whom all my dead spirit squirms!
Forevermore I love thee through all terms
     Until the dead stars rot in the black sky.