‘Darkling I listen; and, for many a time/ I have been half in love with easeful Death’
Keats, Ode to a Nightingale
I’d like to book an easy death, please.
Where do I sign up
for one of those TV movie deaths
with vaseline on the lens, elevator music,
where the leading man’s head gently rolls
to his best side.
I’m prepared to pay premium rates
for my end to approach at the same gradient
as the most safe seaside becomes ocean:
disappearing without realising
soon you’re up to your neck
still returning the beach ball, then
it’s just ripples becoming waves.
No cold-pool-plunge death, if you don’t mind.
Make mine maternity-ward warm.
And I can’t be doing with a gripping-the-guard-rail death,
or a plane-going-down death,
festooned with oxygen masks,
getting sucked through a porthole.
It’s a no to deep-sea dying;
my mini-sub wedged
in a geological pincer, still in radio contact
lit by a LED countdown
and rubbernecking, bioluminescent fauna.
I would settle for a brief-shudder death
or a flick-of-the-switch death
remarked upon for its kindness
by a late night TV panel of cultural icons
including a teary ex-nemesis turned bosom buddy.
No victim’s death, thanks,
where, on the slab, they tweezer out
moth pupas and a kidskin manifesto
that could only have been inserted
while I was alive.
I’m doing my best to avoid
a Citizen-Kane death,
where a black and white montage of missed opportunity
plays around the pillow as my toes curl.
I’d consider a box-tick death
giving me a few weeks prior
where I get to my ideal weight
shuffling around in a hospital smock
my body tight like a bell clapper,
cracking jokes with the nursing staff
who’d dab at their eyes when I leave
to read Keats, very obviously.
And an Autumn death feels right, bright and crisp
but no racing pulse, please. No convulsions
with unseemly frothing.
No adrenalin-jerk realisation
I didn’t complete that last spreadsheet,
or I’d left the gas on
or that I never took the time to tell you
how I really, truly felt.