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-