The Capuchin Crypt Poem by GRANT FRASER

We followed
in the footsteps
of the Marquis De Sade,

We didn't poison
or whip anybody though,

it was in the Capuchin
crypt,
off the Piazza Barberini...

where some far out Friar ('s?)
had taken all these
human bones,

to declare that death
be more decorative for a
change?

a room frilled
with yellowing pelvises,
and shape formations,
what an arrangement of vertabrae,

one for skulls,
another for thigh
and leg bones,

it struck my mortal pate,

four five hundred years
and it all could just as well
be far too late, for anything...

to see so much skeleton
all patterning around in your
smooth felt brain,

bodies propped up in sack,
in their last death throes,

death has shape I suppose?

and sex, it does curl up,

that night, I thought we
had took some of it home,
to the hotel room,

when lights started flickering,
and the lip sync on T.V. failed,
with strange erratic voices
entering through the walls,

and I guzzled Aberlour Whiskey,
feeling somewhat spooked,

(A power cut really) ,

I admit, I ended up drunk
that night in Rome,

and Helen carried me back,
stumbling, laughing,

with the full weight of mortality
gone...