One of the Walking Dead

(Old poem, new verbal arrangement)

If I don’t feel the warmth of the sun

On a sunshiny day,

If I'm too numb to feel

My feet on the ground,

Even when I’m stamping them

Till there's a hole in the soil,

What am I but one of the walking dead?

Even if I don't see the maggots wriggling

In my muscles and digging holes through my bones,

Still I can't feel the loss

Of the falling skin and the melting marrow,

They are but a mask to camouflage,

A harness of decay, a cape to conceal

That I'm but one of the walking dead.

Build me inside the wall till I die,

Deprive me the air that makes me walk,

Limping as a crumbling corpse

On the rhythm of my soulless heart,

Then I'll scratch my name with my own blood

On the back side of the bricks of that wall,

Together with a curse that holds me inside forever,

Because there's only one black thought

That chews like a raging rodent through my darkened mind,

Because I'm now one of the walking dead,

And it’s burning in my lifeless eyes,

It's the never satisfying hunger for:

'Human flesh!' 

© Rudi J.P. Lejaeghere