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Timor Mortis

Published 19 December 2005

By Sean O'Brien

Into the pit go all Estates,
All princes, pimps and potentates,
The fiend next door, the BBC -
The living and those yet to be,
Eminem, Ms Ruby Wax
And Robert Johnson's vanished tracks,
Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle,
Madonna and the Duke of Earl,
Occam's razor, Charlie Chan,
Lord Lucan and the bogey man,
Mister Tony, Conrad Black,
The orchestra from Crackerjack,
The Andrews Sisters, Clausewitz,
That wasname who gets on your tits,
Captain Nemo, Guildenstern
And suchlike planks booked in to burn,
De Tocqueville and Thomas Hobbes,
Ascetics, charvers, Rent-a-Gobs,
Boadicea, Brian Clough -
The world itself is not enough
To satisfy the hungry void,
Though "housewives and the unemployed"
Slip down with Marx and Jackie O.
Last sitting, everything must go -
Indifference and appetite,
The dimwit armies of the night,
Dispensers of banal advice,
Kate Moss and Condoleezza Rice,
Machine Gun Kelly, Iron Mike,
The Beemer and the butcher's bike,
Wallace Stevens, you and me,
The Devil and the deep blue sea,
The wonks who work the cutting edge,
Immanuel Kant and Percy Sledge,
With Peter Pan, the Golden Horde,
All travellers not yet on board
Plus those who think it don't apply,
Who witter, witter, "I'm, like, why?"
Join Zeno, Zog and Baudelaire
As conscripts of le grand nowhere -
Some on ice and some on fire,
Some with slow piano wire,
Screaming, weeping, brave as fuck
And absolutely out of luck.
My friends, Lord Death is cruel but fair:
He loves it when there's nothing there,
No Baghdad and no Superbowl,
No langue and likewise no parole,
No Gulf Stream and no polar ice,
No evidence of Paradise.
His only mood's imperative.
He knows our names and where we live.
He sees no reason to record
The names of those whose bones are stored
In his extensive cellarage:
They are unwritten, like this page.
Come now, and board his empty ark -
What need of poems in the dark?