Life’s long lonely wake
In climbing to the social peak
They cauterized my childhood wound,
I learned to smile instead of speak,
To treat my life as living wake,
The mind grew strong as flesh grew weak,
That early success doomed.
They should have armed me with the tools
To love the ontological,
To love what’s love like savants, fools,
Ascend until I see for miles,
Instead I cowered to the rules
Scatological.
Fish and chips on Friday night,
Haircut on a Saturday,
Sunday in a plebiscite
To vote on Monday’s dying hope,
The working week, the longest night
Of years in feet of clay.
As an adult, male frump,
My angry pin so truculent,
My head replaced by bloody stump,
Directionless in living swamp.
My memory is a landfill dump,
I trudge somnambulant.
Like all the others, I survive,
That cold upbringing left behind,
I operate as though alive
And ponder as I poke the stove.
Reflecting on our human hive
Is grist to morbid mind.
Of course they fucked me up back then
In thrall to grey austerity,
The plainest talking bronchial men
Watched forty years go down the pan.
They told me life comes round again:
Their hatred becomes me.
They drove a waggon, built a bank,
Boiler-scoured and clinker-swept,
Their days were smoky, dour and dank,
Careers climbed to bottom rung.
They had the Luftwaffe to thank:
I don’t, so Jesus wept.
I’ll have to learn the rules alone
Of altruism, chronic ache,
The fissile qualities of bone
And micturiting unctuousness:
Features to which I am prone
In life’s long lonely wake.
But still, they say you have to laugh,
That ‘mustn’t grumble’ grimace-stance,
The undulations of life’s graph
Provide the contrasts, peak and trough.
I did my thinking in the bath
And went for happenstance.
If this all seems existential,
Embracing life’s absurdity,
I’ll grab the horns of meaning’s bull
And give a point to blunted aim.
I clasp death’s grinning, toothsome skull:
Sanguine humanity.
So what’s the lesson learned this time?
Has revolution come to me?
I’ll spy on you, what’s yours is mine:
I’m back in from the icy front.
Rosy glint in bitter wine,
I’ve got my family.
And that’s it. Live for someone else,
Let them learn heuristically,
The sound of death’s old funeral bells
Will always ring like tinnitus.
The welts remain, those distant hells
Are shadows to the free.
