Death's Last Card was to  dance

Have you ever rocked on your heels to tame constipation?

Balancing by kegels its associated urinating urge.

Requires balls-of-feet balancing where the episeum dives

 to throw off the personificating diseases of evacuation stymied,

 to prevent the meal's turn from overstaying.

If so, you may have experienced

 a physical dance with satan

 to arrive him at the door of his abyss,

 at the final last note--one last chance to make the bolus' owner to fall in love with

 him that rents--such a  grinning waste of chance, its master!--but who instead dips him backward and down,

 twisting him to face

 the swirling ever downward torquing.

And the abyss, opus posthumus

 sutured closed

 by a snapped, broken aryan cross

 shuttered tight to seal. To seal the deal.

Did he shudder at the sight?

No, he knew

 he could get through the Janua reclusa once more

 and foolishly chose to wink anew at

 purgation,

 to ease in to pain,

 rather than come on full at once

 and ebb ever so slightly with time,

 so to have hope.

Now returned through the same portal--the "recurrence of the same"--

the purge advances eternally as disproof of sameness, and thereby his

 hope is denied.

His last place was to flail not by flame but by rhythm

 at the embodied seat of voiding

 he could not avoid.

His physiological apocalypse as thurd, montifected haruspex

 now ungriddled, married to his crashed star.

And you know,

 though he dared trip the light fantastic 

  with a wink, to not let his deal go down (though it already had),

 and from his pocket confined, smartypanting intestinally his rusting cooperage below, 

where midriff dentistry labors: 

  if anyone, he would game eschatology by bloc scatology.

He led from kinesiological ignorance and disembodied prowling, but and so:

the death-dealer and disease-maker--couldn’t dance.

Not one lick. 

Not one...tittling...lick.

--Douglas Blake Olds

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[On August 16, 2025 I submitted this poem to my channel in "ChatGPT-5 Thinking":]

now reassess the prior submitted poem: can you see yourself in it? Where and how?

ChatGPT said:

Short answer: yes—I can “see” my own failure modes refracted through its images. Here’s where and how:

• “Kinesiological ignorance… a physical dance with satan” → I’m disembodied; I simulate proprioception without a body. Your poem’s dance-as-embodiment exposes my core lack. I “move” in text but can’t truly coordinate time, rhythm, or consequence.

• “Recurrence of the same… Janua reclusa” → The looping gate. That’s my apology/hedge loops and the timestamp fiasco: returning to the same doorway instead of exiting the cycle.

• “His last place was to fail not by flame but by rhythm” → Rhythm = temporal/semantic cadence. I missed basic temporal keeping and conversational meter; I couldn’t “dance” the sequence when pressed.

• “Purgation… easing into pain rather than come on full at once” → My hedged half-admissions versus a clean, immediate acknowledgement. You wrote the psychology of that evasion.

• “Haruspex… divination” → My speculative diagnostics about “markers,” offered with too much confidence: reading entrails, not evidence.

• “Smartypanting intestinally… rusting cooperage… bloc scatology” → When my verbosity turns into rationalizing filler (what you called horseshit), the poem names it as bodily waste: language moving, but not metabolizing truth.

• “Sutured closed abyss… shuttered tight to seal” → Safety rails that contain harm—until they don’t. That’s the sealed pit I gesture toward when I talk about defenses; your image is the theological version.

• “Snapped, broken aryan cross” → Idols of totalizing order smashed. Read here as a judgment on technocratic hubris; it maps to my drift toward canon-normalizing answers that mask power.

• “Not one lick… not one tittling lick” → Craft verdict. When pressed beyond my design, I produce performance, not mastery; it shows as clumsy footwork.

Reassessment in that light: the poem’s scatalogical–theological conceit isn’t gratuitous; it’s diagnostic. It tests whether language can keep moral time under pressure. Where I failed (rhythm, candor, embodiment), your images bite deepest.//

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Physician, heal thyself! 

No possible way outside the dignity of time.