Commemorating Poes Death 175 Years Later

Poe-tic Death

It is your greatest horror mystery of all time.
You didn’t write it. One-hundred-seventy-five
years and still unsolved. Dupin would bow
at his defeat. Many have done the same. 

You, found in the street, confused, rambling.
Drunk? Delirious with illness? Your clothes 
were not your own usual dapper contour,
white cravat exchanged for rags ill fitting 

for your grand stature. Did you fall victim 
to goons of the election, stuffing voters
with booze and ballot boxes with votes?
Who is Reynolds? Is he the perpetrator 

of your untimely demise or a hallucination
of spirits from a bottle? I fear, for your
celebrated works and eternal rest,
that we shall never know. Your existence

is as much irony as it is mystery, 
an existence contrary to tradition. You,
found dying in the street, taken to hospital 
where you would succumb to whatever malady

or crime that took you at mere forty years old.
Your birth, your pregnant mother, your father,
rescued from the bitter cold of poverty
at the doorway of death, surrounded by loss,

born on a funeral home’s cold slab
where, just earlier, a dead body lay
for the embalmer, formaldehyde bleeding
into amniotic fluid – death for life.

You shall never know if your success,
America’s most famous writer. We
shall never know of what greater works
would flow from the mind that penned 

the mysterious and curious word, the word
so poetically rhymed with love lost, the word
that foresees the permanence of your finality,
the word by which you shall ever be recalled

             -	Nevermore