Death is not final. Life is final in that it is about finishing something. In this poem the poet identifies with a flicker that flew into his glass sliding door.

::::::::

I don't want to die but sometimes
Catch myself wondering
How much do I want to live
I wish I could duck out sometimes

I don't like my choices
How I might keep living
How I might die
I wonder to what extent

I can choose what happens
Next Death is not final
Not as final as life
Alive we have to finish

A flicker crashed into our sliding door
Painful to hear her impact
Soft and hard at once
I found her on the deck

Upside down bleeding
From her beak Gasping
I never heard a bird gasp before
Her long tongue normally spooled

At the back of her skull
Was dangling
When I picked her up
I swear she was dying

Sometimes I am flying blind
Heading for openings that solidify
I veer at the last second
Not from any instinct

Just sudden vision of what
Is right in front of me
Maybe I catch the glint
Of my reflection

Flying toward me
Colliding with myself
Is not my death
In my death I will be flying

At the sliding door and
The door will slide open and
I will soar into a space that
Has no use for wings

Authors Website: https://garylindorff.wordpress.com

Authors Bio:

Gary Lindorff is a poet, writer, blogger and author of five nonfiction books, three collections of poetry, "Children to the Mountain", "The Last recurrent Dream" (Two Plum Press), "Conversations with Poetry (coauthored with Tom Cowan), and a memoir, "Finding Myself in Time: Facing the Music". Lindorff calls himself an activist poet, channeling his activism through poetic voice. He also writes with other voices in other poetic styles: ecstatic, experimental and performance and a new genre, sand-blasted poems where he randomly picks sentence fragments from books drawn from his library, lists them, divides them into stanzas and looks for patterns. Sand-blasted poems are meant to be performed aloud with musical accompaniment.


He is a practicing dream worker(with a strong, Jungian background) and a shamanic practitioner. His shamanic work is continually deepening his partnership with the land. This work can assume many forms, solo and communal, among them: prayer, vision questing, ritual sweating, and sharing stories by the fire. He is a born-pacifist and attempts to walk the path of non-violence believing that no war is necessary or inevitable.