God and Death
God is a long-time neighbor who you used to imagine could become a closer friend – someone that you have become accustomed to judging at a distance.
***
Death is a beautiful woman, infamous, inviolable, sans emotional attachments. She is too beautiful for human emotions. No one remains surprised anymore. No one doubts her majestic impersonality. Strange, then, because tears, cries, and hysterical lamentations accompany her arrival.
***
Death advises. Please marry, or fall in love, or make love in fantasy to shadows lacking corporeal reality. This will lessen the disappointment, the final loss, the bitterness, at the end.
***
Be wary. Stranger.
Life, the felicitous wife; Death, the less kind, less forgiving mistress.
Love yourself less openly. If you love your wife too passionately, too intensely, too proudly, Death, the cryptic, closeted mistress, becomes jealous.
***
Death strews advice like funeral flowers.
Darryl Lorenzo Wellington is poet, essayist, performance artist and journalist living in Santa Fe, NM. His poetry has appeared in Pedestal, Boston Review, Matter Monthly, Drunken Boat, N+1, Yellow Medicine Review, and other places. His collection, Life’s Prisoners, received the 2017 Turtle Island Quarterly poetry chapbook award.
Swimming with Elephants Publications 
A wonderful poem. I love the structure, and the wisdom. Good work D.
This is a gut punch, in the best sort of way. In such spare language, Darryl gives an entire essay in the art of living. What is said in the in-between gives way to a radical musing of what can be done. And how we fit ourselves in the path between camps (God, Love, Death), which of course are no camps at all, but moveable centers upon which we gaze at our contextual constellations. From one life passage to another, we reorient more to one, then the next. Does he speak of life cycles? Philosophies? It’s all there. He makes me think. He makes me question. What more could I ask for?