Allee's "Death" never shows us a deathbed. It hands the whole subject to a single colour and asks black to do what a description normally would. The result is a poem about death as absence: light draining from a face, sound thinning to a whisper, and finally a feeling that has no object left to attach to. Its central idea is that death is less an event to watch than a condition to be felt, and the poem offers no comfort once that feeling arrives.
The structure borrows the logic of the five senses. Four lines begin with the same word, "Black", followed by a sense verb: "looks like", "sounds like", "smells like", "taste like". That repetition works like a slow bell, each line struck on the same note. There is no rhyme and no steady metre, but the lines do shorten. The first runs to about ten syllables, the second is a touch shorter, and the last two shrink to about seven each. The effect is of something narrowing as we read. Then the poem pauses on a blank line, and the final line stretches out to be the longest of all.
The imagery moves through time as well as through the senses. The first line is the most carefully built: "a life leaving a man's eyes". Life becomes a presence that walks out, and "leaving" keeps the departure unfinished, so we watch it happen. What is left behind is the darkness of a gaze that no longer sees. The sound of black is "the last whisper of breath", which is a paradox, because the loudest thing here is almost silence. Then the poem jumps ahead. "Death is coming" is a smell of warning, the kind an animal might catch before a human could name it. By the taste line we are past dying altogether, in the territory of "decaying flesh". The participle matters again: decay is a process, not a state. Across four lines the poem travels from a man's face to his body, from the moment of death to what follows it.
One detail is worth pausing on. Where the first three sense verbs end in -s, the fourth reads "Black taste like decaying flesh". Whether that is a slip or a choice, the printed line stumbles at exactly the point where the imagery is most physically repellent, and a reader hears the break in the pattern. There is also a quiet circularity in the poem. Black is defined as death, yet the word "death" appears inside the definition ("smells like death is coming"), as though the poem cannot get outside the thing it describes.
The last line changes the rules. "Black is the feeling you get at the end of it all" drops "like", and the comparisons give way to a flat statement of identity. It also drops the body. A strict run through the senses would end on touch, but the poem replaces it with "feeling" in the emotional sense, something no skin can report. The pronoun "you" pulls the reader in, since the earlier lines described a stranger ("a man's eyes") and now the experience is ours. "The end of it all" is deliberately huge and vague. It gathers everything into a phrase so general that it cannot be argued with, and the poem stops there without consolation or afterlife.
The poem's significance lies in its economy. A reader might expect a subject like death to demand grand language, but Allee works with plain words and an almost mechanical frame, and the plainness is the point. The frame itself recalls the sense-by-sense exercises often used to teach descriptive writing, and the poem shows how far that simple pattern can be pushed once the subject is serious. The reader is invited to notice how a concept as abstract as death becomes bearable to think about only when it is translated into things we know from experience: a look, a sound, a smell, a taste. The poem then tells us that translation has a limit, and the final line admits it by moving from what black resembles to what black is. It is short, bleak and a little rough at the edges, and that roughness suits it.