Man

Man
The body disappoints
Then impresses, then fails, then triumphs
It’s a sad, old miracle to have to watch

The whole thing misbehaves with hours
Dressings, tubes, fentanyl patches
Weird, sticky wrapped, crackling palliative props
In the slow banal mystery of
"When is this person going to die?"

His soon-to-be deathbed smelled of dry-roasted
"I solemnly promise I have not been giving him snacks of any kind"
Said nice Claire, the carer
"Why is there no dry roasted residue around his mouth?"
My mum asked
"Someone must’ve been dusting his chin
And lips"

His crumbling architecture
Like a balsa-wood cathedral
His buttresses and columns collapsing
And us, obliged to notice

Weakened bones, bruises
Dehydration, confusion
All these items on the death list
Correctly occurring

"Did he look peaceful when he finally passed?"
Yep
"Did he look suddenly younger?"
Yes
"Did it seem as if he was not there, like his soul had left his body behind?"
No
He seemed he was the same bloke
Dead

His last few hundred breaths
Tricky to pull in
And trickling diminished out

His children argued quietly
Fizzing bitterly on a lateral axis
While their dad shed the weight
Of all the meals he’d ever eaten
All the things he’d ever been
A vicious, stubborn
Witty, dedicated
Kind, privileged...
All of these words
Naked and cooling
Towards meaningless
Pale in the unkind light
Unfixing their meaning from the body

Gazing down upon him
Ten of us, our thoughts
All burrowing towards each other
Breathing the held air
Waiting for him to be gone
Marvelling at his slightness
The quiet, the swallows, the sighing

My cousin said
"The idea of the the living outnumbering the dead
Is nonsense
The dead club is always going to be bigger"
He said
"One hundred billion"
He said
"Or there about"
We nodded
And looked back down at this man
We apparently know

The body farted
The kind of fart you do when nobody’s there
Because nobody was
We were all dead
He was alive
Triumphantly emptying his corridors and organs
Of dirty, useless air

What an odd, blindfold performance family is
We live in such strange ways
It’s like a pact
We act
Surprised
And, by-and-by

We are