There’s Enough of them Walking Around

 

There’s Enough of them Walking Around

 

You shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, really, 

after all, there’s enough of them

walking around, dispensing

tuppeny ha’penny like Panadol.

You imagine it don’t come to them quickly,

but when it do, oh, it do, don’t it?

Surely some sort of blinding flash,

scream the word, Betty's mad dash

and cashing in their chips,

yes, he’s had them all right,

I bet my life on nobody thought of it:

just splashing shit all over

like the great smell of internet drek.

How should I know? Most probably

some old shit like lead kindly light,

lead on Macduff; alas poor skull, I led him

to ignore me when I said

‘don’t wear that asses head,

oh, you really shouldn’t speak ill of the dead.’

After all, that could be you,

slipping discs on some scree,

and with a resultant shingled pepper-arse,

look at the sky, breathe your last,

pointing your feet up towards the sun.

On a brick. Or a rock. After a fall.

Much good it does us all,

because here’s your Greek God having a laugh,

at some actual dopey old Oedipus Rex,

in sun-specs, sporting a panama,

a black umbrella in the sun,

in sport he comes, and still he comes,

giving his legs and muscles a good flex,

like he told us all to do on the telly.

And so brave, hubris sorely missed,

I know this, because, as you'd expect

it’s all over my laptop like scabies:

dancing above his slip-slipping head

the Pleiades wink behind the sun,

as with collective tribute,

a million stabbing fingers take buckets to the well,

fill with a million sobbing cliches and tell

how you should feel as they felt;

oh, tonight thank God it’s them instead of you,

and taste and reason to the stars is fled,

if ever you should speak ill to the dead.