What Will Death Be Like?

Death will be unlike the night-times when we lie awake thinking of death
Death will be unlike the Spanish maracas that rattle inside your last breath

Death will be unlike the Mexican festivals, skeletons wearing top hats
Death will be unlike the brownstone apartments that dynamite or dereliction collapse

Death will be unlike the mandolin that the hangman relaxes by playing
Death will be unlike the hound of the Baskervilles, chilling the world with its baying

Death will be unlike the British museum, its bodies from peat bogs & bones
Death will be unlike the curse of the mummy that turns the explorers to stone

Death will be unlike a great roller coaster, a plunge from a boast to a scream
Death will be unlike mahogany coffins great pianists play in their wildest strangest dreams

Death will be unlike a garden in autumn where poets can sit & compose
Death will be unlike the granite memorials where memories wither in rows

Death will be unlike the charge of the Light Brigade Alfred Lord Tennyson rhymed
Death will be unlike the thin piece of paper that Reagan & Gorbachov sign

Death will be unlike the hospital bedside with Novocain needles & cards
Death will be unlike the great Day of judgement when God the headmaster presents the awards

Death will be unlike the marriage that vicars till death us do part
Death will be unlike the dreams of the young man who sang "Love will tear us apart"

Death will be unlike TV documentaries showing us life from outside
Death will be unlike the Buddhist nirvana the moth seems to seek in the light

Death will be unlike the cities of crystal they build in a few grains of smack
Death will be unlike the long picture window the coffin looks through to a widow in black

Death will be unlike a room full of spiders all clinging together & crying
Death will be unlike the wedding guest's story, the ship drifting lost & the dead sailor sighing

Death will be unlike the din in the steeple when cholera poisons the village
Death will be unlike the illumination that Tolstoy provided for poor Ivan Illych

Death will be unlike the wriggling sea children glimpse through the chinks in the boardwalk
Death will be unlike the magical land of "The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe"

Death will be unlike the treacherous virus that murders the lovers with AIDS
Death will be unlike the phantoms of freedom that lead the crowd over the barricades

Death will be unlike the night thoughts of "Late Call" when ministers stop being cosy
Death will be unlike "The Pit and the Pendulum" co-starring Bela Lugosi

Death will be unlike the bulge of the mouse inside the boa constrictor
Death will be unlike that drunkard the phoenix, so tight on the moonshine of golden elixirs

Death will be unlike that violent pornography dear to the Marquis de Sade
Death will be unlike the last stitch of clothing the stripper discards as her nipples grow hard

Death will be unlike the bankrupt handing over the keys to his house
Death will be unlike the last day of summer, when insects grow stupid & swallows fly south

Death will be unlike the skull of a merchant that slants through the portrait by Holbein
Death will be unlike that strange proposition on silence, the Tractatus of Wittgenstein

Death will be unlike your holiday snaps when the camera lets in the light
Death will be unlike the honest but cold blooded bank clerk whose hobby is homicide

Death will be unlike the hands of the clock coming together at midnight
Death will be unlike the grim amputations of medical students larking on rag night

Death will be unlike the hijacker's voice in the heads of air traffic controllers
Death will be unlike the sea as it thunders on Liv Ullman vanishing under the rollers

Death will be unlike the abbey the pilgrims all saw when they prayed
Death will be unlike the unholy land at the end of the Children's Crusade

Death will be unlike the hell in "Huis Clos" Mr Sartre informs is just other people
Death will be unlike the travelling salesman who woke up one morning transformed to a beetle

Death will be unlike 2001, the room at the end of the ride
Death will be unlike the wrath that Charles Bronson let loose on the Lower East Side

Death will be unlike the house of the shades the dog Cerberus guarded for Hades his master
& death will be unlike that lesson on Infallibility, the Chernobyl disaster

& death will be unlike the empty career of the temp's vacillations gone permanent
Death will be unlike the unlikely omens the clairvoyant reads in the meaningless firmament
In the meaningless firmament

What will death be like?
What will death be like?

Death will be like