A birth is normally a moment for celebration, but "The Start of Decay" reads the first minutes of a life as the opening of a countdown. The Bard of Falconia, as the poet is credited, follows a baby from the first blurred glimpse of light to the first blanket, and at every stage something is being lost as well as gained. The central idea is that being born and starting to die are the same event. The title says so outright, and the poem spends four stanzas proving it.
The structure is as orderly as the idea it carries. Four quatrains move in strict chronological order: the cosmic frame (the Wheel of Fate), the arrival of light, the first cry and breath, and finally the swaddled calm. The rhyme scheme is a steady ABAB, with "turning" answering "hurting" and "vision" answering "collision." Some rhymes are only approximate. "Lungs" and "young" share just their ending sound, and "blankets" and "certificate" echo each other loosely. The lines are short, mostly five to eight syllables, with no fixed metre and almost no punctuation. They are end-stopped and flat in tone, like items ticked off a list. That plainness suits a poem about something that "stops for no one."
The word "starts" holds much of the poem together. The title announces "the start," then the baby "starts hurting," time "starts to run," and the mother's energy "starts to deplete." Nothing in the poem finishes, and everything is only beginning to go wrong. The rhymes in the second stanza make a quieter point. "Incomplete" is paired with "deplete," so the newborn's lack and the mother's loss sit at the ends of lines that answer each other, as if what one gains the other pays for. The mother appears as "Her" before she is named, which makes her exhaustion feel like a side effect of the baby's arrival.
The imagery strips birth of its usual softness. Light does not shine; it "penetrates your vision," a verb closer to injury than welcome. The world arrives as "Blurry, a color collision," where the clashing "c" and "l" sounds reproduce the overload of an eye seeing for the first time. The third stanza turns clinical, with "Oxygen fills your lungs" and the blunt, unglamorous "slime." The people who "clean up" are an anonymous "They," and the baby is always the one things happen to. Even the cry is a reflex rather than a choice. The one tender line, "A mother holds her young," uses "young" instead of "child," a word from the animal world that reduces the moment to biology.
The ending is the cleverest turn. The blankets and the word "safe" promise comfort, but "safe" is rhymed with "fate," so the two ideas are tied together just as the reassurance arrives. Then comes the cold detail of the signed "certificate," a piece of paperwork that "marks your fate." Fate returns from the first line, so the poem closes its own circle just as the Wheel suggests. A birth certificate is also a document with only one missing entry, and the poem leaves the reader to supply it. That final step is an inference, since the poem never mentions death, but the title's "decay" makes it hard to avoid. The second person matters here too. Because the poem says "you" throughout, the reader cannot stand outside the scene as a spectator; the certificate is theirs.
The poem's significance lies in the gap between how it sounds and what it says. Its rhymes are nursery-simple and its vocabulary is everyday, yet the content is bleak. That contrast makes the grimness harder to shrug off, because the poem refuses to dress it up. Whether a reader finds the view too pessimistic is a fair question, since the poem leaves out joy, love and the long middle of a life. But as a compact argument that the cradle and the clock arrive together, it is effective. Nothing is known here about who stands behind the pen name, and the poem does not need that information. Everything it asks of the reader is already in the text.