Stand by! The countdown has begun.
The cameras roll: I hold the floor,
Balance my cocktail, block the pain,
At my best time, for the last time,
Thinking about God – not the old sod,
Cruelty’s first cause, who dwells
Within or beyond us, but what compels
A man or woman to create and give.
Life quickens as it dwindles,
Grows in the blossoming whiteness
Of a plum tree near my window,
Sown in the accidental land,
Heart-shaped between rivers,
In sight of remembered hills.
What makes us care for a land
we share with living and dead,
waving no flags of nationhood,
a place lit by a sun, not owned
by the cancer he called Rupert?
He hated, would not kill his hate –
so little time, so much to write.
At death’s approach the jibes and spite
to which he usually said Up you,
but which occasionally got through
matter no more: even when young
none set a penny on his tongue.
Now he plans a posthumous closure
under full media exposure.
He sits there with his ginger hair,
smoking, smoking and itching.
You’d think the bug would finally
give up, but he has work to do,
and somewhere still to go, that’s why
he’s much unlike his private eye
who suffered from that raw disease
of psoriatic shame. He sits at ease,
unlike his questioner who smiles,
delivers an uncertain cue
in this last friendly interview
in front of lights and camera crew
who filter a million viewers through.
His words are simple – syntax too,
polysyllables creep in, though, like reification – you know –
making people objects? Marx knew
(he gestures with his cigarette)
how custom consumes customers.
We know how drugs can generate
euphoria: but truly to create
we need the pain. He smiles
and dwells almost with gaiety
on mind and body’s destiny.
How make a present of our past?
He settles in his chair, lip synchs
a childhood hymn - and thinks.
What language will convey his sense
when counting heads is all that counts,
when money and fear invite us to
deify men of clay – and reify
ourselves? What we may do
is fight the fight which filters
through his lens. Crucial the years
before fourteen. A child lives in
the NOW, is NOW, will be NOW.
Now he is Orpheus’ sweating brow,
a brain compelled to chatter
upon a salver or a platter,
to scatter words and entertain,
Breathes truths who breathes his words in pain.
Gaunt memorial Son of Man,
he carves just once again
DPP upon a screen.
Cold Lazarus relives his past,
desiring not to live NOW then.
His karaoke is wound up,
his bell is rung,
his century’s sing-along is sung.
.
©Terry Hodgson2020
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