Death Poem by Tom Sinclair

I pick up five pence from the floor and bemoan the removal of one of my favourite skips
Last night I stole a sealed kettle plug from a printer box outside a friends neighbours house
Today I pontificate over how one person's trash is another's treasure
While I walk into death
The ambulance whizzes past with sirens blaring and the lyric 'Another one bites the dust" pops into my head and I can't help but sing a couple of bars all to myself
Death races on
Life ponders inextricably
You can't stop it
I don't want to stop it
Life is for the living
Death is for everything else
The void awaits
And we all lie prostate
Prometheus like in the sun
The buzzards rend
The innards
From inside so they are out
Like the pencil
Marks on the wall of my dreams
The pastel marks of my art
On the wall of my hospital room
My mind will break
And my body will struggle on
Lifeless
Spiritless
Show me your god
And I will show you nothing
But death eternal
The universe was not created
But has never been
So death walks away from the conservative knees up
At Margaret Thatcher's house
As he holds her demure pixie boots
She totters behind muttering obscenities
Weaving wildly in socks
Flat footed
To pause at a bus stop
Because a lace in the fabric of time
Is undone

I look at the blue twinkling star, twirling in the wind on a telephone line
I look at the garish branded start up screen of a flat screen TV, through a lit window
I look at the blonde mistress in the newly registered imported car,
Who awaits on yellow lines
With her hazards on
And I contemplate the red light bulb
Still lying beside the path
Unused and unblinking
And I think of the morbid turn of conversation last night
That they wouldn't even have his body for medical science
What if the sky refused my smoke?
The soil refuses my dust?
Death is all around us
And it waits for me
At the end
Of each
Poem
And I would burn all the trees in this world and the next
To see you
Again

Tom Sinclair (Smith)