What Will Death Be Like?

Death will be unlike

The night-times when we lie awake thinking of death

The Spanish maracas that rattle inside the last breathe

The Mexican festivals, skeletons wearing top hats

The Brownstone apartments that dynamite or dereliction collapse

The Mandolin the hangman relaxes by playing

The Hound of the Baskervilles, chilling the moors with its baying

The Curse of the mummy that turns the explorers to stone

The British museum, its bodies from peat bogs and bones

The great roller coaster, a plunge from a boast to a scream

Mahogany coffins great pianists play in their wildest strangest dreams

A garden in autumn where poets can sit and compose

The granite memorials where memories wither in rows

The charge of the Light Brigade Alfred Lord Tennyson rhymed

The thin piece of paper that Reagan and Gorbachov sign

The hospital bedside with Novocain needles and cards

The great day of judgement when God the headmaster presents the awards

The marriage that bickers till death us do part

The dreams of the young man who sang Love will tear us apart

TV documentaries showing us life from outside

The Buddhist nirvana the moth seems to seek in the light

The Cities of crystal they build on in a few grains of smack

The long picture window the coffin look through to a widow in black

A room full of spiders all clinging together and crying

The wedding guest's story, the ship drifting lost and the dead sailors sighing

The din in the steeple when cholera poisons the village

The Illumination that Tolstoy provided for poor Ivan Illych

The Wrinkling sea children glimpse through the chinks in the boardwalk

The magical land of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe

The treacherous virus that murders the lovers with AIDS

The phantoms of freedom that lead the crowd over the barricades

The night thoughts of 'Late Call' when ministers stop being cosy

'The Pit and the Pendulum' co-starring Bela Lugosi

The bulge of the mouse inside the boa constrictor

That drunkard the phoenix, so tight on the moonshine of golden elixirs

The bankrupt, handing over the keys to his house

The last day of summer, when insects grow stupid and swallows fly south

The skull of a merchant that slants through the portrait by Holbein

That strange proposition on silence, the Tractatus of Wittgenstein

The hands of the clock, coming together at midnight

The grim amputations of medical students larking on rag night

The hijacker's voice in the heads of air traffic controllers

The sea as it thunders on Liv Ullman vanishing under the rollers under the rollers

The abbey the pilgrims all saw when they prayed

The unholy land at the end of the Children's Crusade

The hell in Huis Clos Mr Sartre informs is just other people

The travelling salesman who woke up one morning transformed to a beetle

2001, the room at the end of the ride

The wrath that Charles Bronson let loose on the Lower East Side

The House of the Shades the dog Cerberus guarded for Hades his master

That lesson on Infallibility, the Chernobyl disaster

The empty career of the temp's vacillations gone permanent

The unlucky omens the clairvoyant reads in the meaningless firmament

In the meaningless firmament

What will death be like?

Death will be like-