September 2: Live Fearless Day

To Fear the Hereafter

To be a brawler? To capitulate?
To take up arms against the insolent
in quest of vengeance, or to tolerate
the scoundrel, giving ground to discontent?

Or not to be alive? Perhaps to sleep,
perchance to dream, at last to consummate
one's passing from the living earth, to reap
rewards upon a spiritless estate.

But prudence intervenes: I'm not to be
the venturer who straddles gates of death
if caverns in the black eternity
will reek with pleadings from a tortured breath!

I falter, numbed, with fading cast of thought
within the crypt my raveled mind has wrought.