What Will Death Be Like?

Death will be unlike the night-times when we lie awake thinking of death
 Death will be unlike the Spanish maracas that rattle inside your last breath
 Death will be unlike the Mexican festivals, skeletons wearing top hats
 Death will be unlike the brownstone apartments that dynamite or dereliction collapse
 Death will be unlike the mandolin the hangman relaxes by playing
 Death will be unlike the Hound of the Baskervilles, chilling the moors with its baying
 Death will be unlike the British museum, its bodies from peat bogs and bones
 Death will be unlike the curse of the mummy that turns the explorers to stone
 Death will be unlike the great roller coaster, a plunge from a boast to a scream
 Death will be unlike mahogany coffins great pianists play in their wildest strangest dreams
 Death will be unlike a garden in autumn where poets can sit and compose
 Death will be unlike the granite memorials where memories wither in rows
 Death will be unlike the charge of the Light Brigade Alfred Lord Tennyson rhymed
 Death will be unlike the thin piece of paper that Reagan and Gorbachov sign
 Death will be unlike the hospital bedside with Novocain needles and cards
 Death will be unlike the great day of judgement when God the headmaster presents the awards
 Death will be unlike the marriage that bickers 'til death us do part
 Death will be unlike the dreams of the young man who sang 'Love will tear us apart'
 Death will be unlike TV documentaries showing us life from outside
 Death will be unlike the Buddhist nirvana the moth seems to seek in the light
 Death will be unlike the Cities of crystal they build in a few grains of smack
 Death will be unlike the long picture window the coffin looks through to a widow in black
 Death will be unlike a room full of spiders all clinging together and crying
 Death will be unlike the wedding guest's story, the ship drifting lost and the dead sailors sighing
 Death will be unlike the din in the steeple when cholera poisons the village
 Death will be unlike the illumination that Tolstoy provided for poor Ivan Illych
 Death will be unlike the wrinkling sea children glimpse through the chinks in the boardwalk
 Death will be unlike the magical land of 'The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe'
 Death will be unlike the treacherous virus that murders the lovers with AIDS
 Death will be unlike the phantoms of freedom that lead the crowd over the barricades
 Death will be unlike the night thoughts of 'Late Call' when ministers stop being cosy
 Death will be unlike 'The Pit and the Pendulum' co-starring Bela Lugosi
 Death will be unlike the bulge of the mouse inside the boa constrictor
 Death will be unlike that drunkard the phoenix, so tight on the moonshine of golden elixirs
 Death will be unlike that violent pornography, dear to the Marquis de Sade
 Death will be unlike the last stitch of clothing the stripper discards as her nipples grow hard
 Death will be unlike the bankrupt, handing over the keys to his house
 Death will be unlike the last day of summer, when insects grow stupid and swallows fly south
 Death will be unlike the skull of a merchant that slants through the portrait by Holbein
 Death will be unlike that strange proposition on silence, the Tractatus of Wittgenstein
 Death will be unlike your holiday snaps when the camera lets in the light
 Death will be unlike the honest-but-cold-blooded bank clerk whose hobby is homocide
 Death will be unlike the hands of the clock, coming together at midnight
 Death will be unlike the grim amputations of medical students larking on rag night
 Death will be unlike the hijacker's voice in the heads of air traffic controllers
 Death will be unlike the sea as it thunders on Liv Ullman vanishing under the rollers
 Death will be unlike the abbey the pilgrims all saw when they prayed
 Death will be unlike the unholy land at the end of the Children's Crusade
 Death will be unlike the hell in Huis Clos Mr Sartre informs is just other people
 Death will be unlike the travelling salesman who woke up one morning transformed to a beetle
 Death will be unlike 2001, the room at the end of the ride
 Death will be unlike the wrath that Charles Bronson let loose on the Lower East Side
 Death will be unlike the House of the Shades the dog Cerberus guarded for Hades his master
 And death will be unlike that lesson on Infallibility, the Chernobyl disaster
 And death will be unlike the empty career of the temp's vacillations gone permanent
 Death will be unlike the unlucky omens the clairvoyant reads in the meaningless firmament
 In the meaningless firmament
 What will death (what will death)
 Be like? (be like?)
 What will death (what will death)
 Be like? (be like?)
 Death will be like -