Death's Invisible Cloak



Death can be a cloak of hard and heavy lead. It can accumulate the Big Deaths,
and become the pain you trudge with,  weighing on your spine, crumpling your legs
and twisting your ankles- and the hardest part is that it is invisible

Death can be a cloak of quills- the Little Deaths. It can poke and prickle and make thousands of
tiny piercing wounds over your whole body- and the hardest part is the invisibility

Death can feel like a cloak of the sweetest baby’s breath nestled into your neck
with tiny dreaming eyelids fluttering and you just want to hold it close
 and never move in fear that you will remember the impermanence

The Cloak of Death can look like a dare devil.
It can look haughty, indifferent, miserable, miserly, aggressive, criminal…
it can look like rigor mortis in the form of an over-priced garment or a car that the owner cannot afford

Death’s cloak can smell like decaying hopes, untilled fertile fields and like too many out-
breaths trapped in a stagnant phase of life spent in video games and social media

Death’s cloak can drape a denial so heavily over your eyes that a
Very Long and Expected Death can tear a hole in your closed eyelids when the death actually arrives

Death’s cloak can taste like one bite chewed but not swallowed, like holy
deprivation or like it’s best friend;  Easy Lots of Abundance,- meats, sweets and non-stop food fast

Death’s cloak can look Very Important and Successful with plans and schedules, busy-busy-busy,
 endless hours, power drinks and excessive health routines

The Cloak of Death can be hooded with mirrors, and bowls, razors, pipes and needles,
 bottles that clank with endless grasping at their bottoms and heavy gas on the pedal...
It can look like a take-me-now flirt with death

Death’s cloak can feel like urgency, like love, promises and hot rushes of adrenaline pumping
blood into temples and fingers and loins and the overwhelming desire to
Rain Down Seeds over all of time and space

The Cloak of Death can be custom shrouded, with carefully constructed mourning jewelry,
advanced planning and ethical wills and can arrive as a death doula that is “death positive”

Death’s cloak can be silken, light, iridescent, trailing behind you dragging by your perfect pinky finger
as you walk or dance through streets and fields and time—and only
when it is stepped upon do you look back in shock of why you never noticed it there before

Death’s Cloak can be made of golden feathers- of wings that encircle the earth
and touch the tip of the stars- that only started the rhythmic
beat of Lift and Power and Perspective and of True Clarity after the realization
that you were wearing, and proud of, your sacred Cloak of Death

The Cloak of Death is your only true Birth Day present.
It will cloak 10,000 manifestations in this one life.
The riddle is that it is both your life and your death.
The challenge is that it will always be invisible.
The promise is, the weave of its consistency is the very universe itself.

© Anne-Marie Keppel


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