Delayed Death Syndrome

It seems like every month
they are falling like flies.
He was 59
when found dead in the late winter.
Evicted from public housing,
he died of hypothermia.
It was 29 degrees that night.
The body was found in tattered clothes
and his shoes were held together by string.
It took three months to find next of kin
--his mother is in her eighties
She’s in failing health --
her son in cold storage.
She had braced herself for a call
when he was in Vietnam.
She wrote the president
to send her son home before he died.
He lost his mind
and his memory in Vietnam.
No one broke through the walls of his silence
and trauma to help him.
Death was the inevitable result
and it was neither sweet nor proper.