Playing Dead

There is a war going on, and pointed sticks,
with a KAPOW, have turned lethal.
Clutching your chest, you fall to the ground.
The battlefield momentarily goes quiet
as you groan and thrash in death’s cold grip.
But your time in the spotlight is brief;
before you can expire with a final shudder,
the war’s noisy ferocity begins again.
Punctured with wormholes, the ground is
no comfortable bier; its prickly grass
exhales a sickly sweet odor of roots’ decay.
How boring it is to remain dead,
lonely and forgotten, unable to move until
you have counted to one hundred.
Distracted by the cloud-spotted sky above,
a circus parade of bizarre creatures,
losing track, you’re forced to begin again.
What if you are truly paralyzed or
the game concludes before reanimation?
Testing each limb for movement,
you decide to cheat death, jumping ahead
in the countdown to ninety-five.
Bloodied with grass strains, but impervious
now to the bullet’s stinging bite,
you’re a tomcat with eight lives yet to live.
Declaring yourself resurrected,
you charge into the fray with stick blazing.