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What makes life last
1. The Google search for everlasting life
“Find out what makes life last” is what I heard
and, bloated with frustration, belched the word: “Last” [>Search]
“Which answer would you like?” my fury rasped.
And while the keyboard kicked out “life” and “last”;
the screen swept back two billion thoughts, reckoned
by the net in one eighth of a second.
This is life at last:
it lasts a Life
when you live life to the last.
You can have a faster life,
a master life, an afterlife.
Why not make your profits last,
Your losses last
Lost Prophets last.
Learn when to make your …
How to make your love last,
Your lust last,
You come last.
Make a marriage that will last
Let this marriage be your last:
Another woman saved your life
last night.
We make batteries that last and last;
We make power first and last
We can make your powers last,
flowers last, last hours last …
When did you last change your life?
Get change from life?
Arrange your life?
Enjoy the good life last?
Draw up a last account?
You must sustain the chain of life
and get yourself an aim in life,
Design for Life.
And still you bear the pain of life
however long it lasts.
You’re living with the lasting cost of care
You’re in the last year of your life,
You’re looking to give meaning
To your life’s last days.
The last thing you will think of
is how life’s made –
is life everlasting?
is it really life-size?
And the last thing you will think of
is the last man on Mars.
No! not this, no!
Is “now” and “fast”
more true than slow,
more real than past?
I want to know
What makes life last;
But clichés flow
like oil on glass:
Treasuring each moment leaves us stronger –
that’s how God can make our lives last longer.
… Now you can make lives last with consequence
playing Zombie Apocalypse Defence.
… Please donate freely here to spread the word
of godlessness to the living and interred.
It was so clear only a seer
who’d persevere more than my years
could engineer an answer here.
Could I be the line that veers?
At the bedside at the ebbtide
“acceptance” is the golden rule,
the goal which gets us through,
the tool which can outwit the ghoul
that plays us for a grieving fool.
A quality which makes life last could be
anywhere – from sense up to infinity,
from culture, chemistry to my settee
from then to here, as far as we can see.
And how would I know what the search has missed?
if there’s no answer? if answers exist?
Yes sure, death itself lends us no way back,
but life’s, like white, the other side of black;
so if there are five stages in our grieving
might we stop the search where we could be leaving?
Grief’s said to trail five steps behind the hearse
so why not follow grieving in reverse?
reject acceptance and the bargain stage,
then break depression and denial with rage?
The Mourning News – Acceptance
Last words aren’t those our dear departed used,
they’re not composed and muttered by a muse;
wise up: they’re what the vigil-keepers choose.
… We’re tuning in to the mourning news:
the razored questions, mouthwash views,
Westminster bruisers who cynically excuse
abuses by our spooks and snoopers,
a journalist who just can’t listen
as he’s too intent on pissing
off the guests who he’s accused,
and a caller who’s a bit obtuse.
There’s a shot of politics at eight o five,
prompt and daily, tough and live
that ministers dare not refuse;
then the slot where young articulate smart-
arses ridicule the arts,
and a drab parade of boring farts
or someone skilled at baking tarts,
and spots for language to unravel
in outlandish sporting babble
sandwiched by a prayer and weather,
which somehow keep it all together.
This is the page that keeps accounts,
this is the field where the ball is bounced
this stage is where the critic flounced
and is momentarily renounced
because: “… The death has been announced…”
And suddenly the medium has pounced.
It happened just a moment ago
but reports will cover everything we know
and it will be as ever blow by blow.
His death will be a shock to those
who loved him and those not quite so close;
the fact that he’ll be missed goes
without saying, almost, as the story flows
of a man who claimed the People were his bros.
We hear that he’s a “national treasure”,
a man of energy and leisure,
urbane and foul-mouthed under pressure,
mysterious and born in Asia,
(though some said Esher, others Cheshire),
arbiter of taste but styleless dresser
most charming when he played aggressor –
just a guy like us or
a saint in contemplation,
modest, shy on all the TV stations.
We bathed in hope and empty pleasure
and gave him ceaseless approbation
sweetened smugly with our indignation
at his apparent abnegation.
So I opened a door
and I came upon a heron on the lawn ...
Beyond the garden, lost in lanes,
stubble stumps and flails in far farm fields,
as if resisting some coming catastrophe.
Catsear grows dwarfed,
tucked into the grass out of sheepreach.
Yarrow, hawkbit, hemp agrimony,
the hangers on into October
are watching the landslope corrode or
the season flick a switch.
The landscape leans forward
it’s all spaced and pinched for winter.
Though warmth and water weaken dying stems
everything now is food and sustenance,
the matter of who’s eating whom.
Decay and advantage fall into balance;
mosses supersede the grass;
a new kingdom rules the lions and clowns:
its messages passed underground
on hidden threads that make connections
between acceptance and affection.
You can tell if your head’s too close to the ground
when you can see shadows of birds and clouds.
... Yet when I came upon the heron on the lawn
I opened a door.
There’s a place across fields heading for town
where dead people decompose underground;
studying the headstones there I found …
There’s a problem ahead. We’ll all soon be dead;
so it won’t matter much whatever we’ve said.
And if in the end we’re all going to croak
what’s got more point: life? death? or a joke?
If we die yet influence the lives of others –
so what, when they too are all doomed snuffers?
Most of our achievements, if we’ve got them,
charm a generation till forgotten,
and memories of what we’ve been and done
in time will thin out to names etched in stone;
so who’s to know that we had brains or hearts
if we’re just dates on documents and charts?
When engraved names too succumb to weather
when we’ve become someone else’s whatever
with our bones returned to the cells of plants
it won’t matter then what we had in our pants.
All species fade, and mankind’s extinction
could mean that you and I will lose distinction.
Yet might humans, godlike, some day disperse
to populate a neutral universe?
Will we feature then in heroic verses
or follow them on photos in their purses?
It’s too late for me now to get into trouble,
so I’ve been pondering as I do most days
whether I should write the Great English Novel,
and if so what was left for me to say.
Then it occurs to me, as most days when I
ponder, that I too am going to die.
Though I grasp the logic of acceptance,
is there a hint of sadness and reluctance?
my jagged mind cranks down towards the chief
and second stage of self-defeating grief.
The Mourning News – Depression
A pall pulls down on his finale:
it lasts a while, we don’t keep tally.
It’s not as if we’ve been that pally,
we didn’t know him well, not personally,
though we always thought he’d be our ally
if we’d tried to challenge
funding for the opera or ballet
an airport in the Severn Valley,
that Hailey’s Comet’s really “Halley’s”.
But today there’ll be no rally:
last posts are drowning out reveille.
The death of someone with his aura
was also sure to draw a plethora
of tinsel tributes and afford a
darker border to his bright aurora;
and so while mourners wait on corners
broadcasters fall about to call a
friend, a fawning old explorer
who deplores the loss of fauna, flora
and a host of other fading causes.
By now the whole world wants to stake a claim
to share the pain and, by association, fame;
just speak his name and get in on the game.
There’s no rationing the information.
Voices everywhere are crashing in,
hopeful they’ll cash in by splashing
their untimely allegations.
Tweeters clamour to complain:
if they’ve been listening in the rain,
contentment and containment sound the same –
although Guantanamo’s a shame.
Looking for answers, you may find the cost
is recovering ideas you didn’t know were lost.
Depression holds you down so you can’t get free
then drags your scraps inside the black settee.
I tend to find things which are difficult
to work out slip down the back of the settee.
You suspect they’re there but just can’t grab them:
instead there’s a handful of grubby coins
whose value you exaggerate at first.
That’s not what you hoped – compassion, purpose,
the capacity to communicate
without abstractions. These are out of reach, wedged
between a hidden rational framework
and upholstery’s giving intuition.
I still recall three questions my son
has asked me to which there was no answer –
once when he was ten: “why did you leave home?”
why, at twenty-one, I had no words of praise,
then “how do you feel?” when my father died.
I’m sure he wanted more than information,
not this embroidered cushion conversation;
I fumbled and groped for something out of range
but all I offered was some lost loose change.
It’s tough that all the stuff you feel down there
is real enough yet not what you suppose.
It may have been some use nine months ago
perhaps it solves a problem late next year.
But don’t expect to put an end to doubt
about to what your life and death amount.
It may be wiser to discover nothing
than to find that nothing is worth knowing;
a sofa’s disappointment’s not a lesson
when it sucks you down in its depression.
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