He emerges from a fog of smoke
coughs a grouted smoker’s cough, repetitive,
a machine gun sound
that disgusted and excited him
when he was alive.
*
A cigarette hangs from his mouth
like an old-fashioned gangster
in a 1930s flick –
he’d like that look, I think
he always craved to be a movie star.
*
He flicks the tip on the ground,
where it joins a carpet of slag,
coalmine thick. I’ve never seen
so much ash – piles of black dust
that gathers in drifts, shifting, restless
*
and shapes into forms, dissolves, reforms
volatile stalactites – hints of lives extinguished
old, young, women, men, the famous,
the beautiful, the plain, the secret rulers,
the obscure, the ignored
*
all together, all alike, as he is –
his greatest fear accomplished –
his substance an illusion.
He moves toward us
the same jerky walk as in life –
*
not a gangster’s swagger –
and though he sneers, he is a shade
of himself, a ragged animation
of his quirks and tics – jabbing finger,
mocking lips, jutting chin, erratic eyes.
*
He is not alone –
in death as in life, he is surrounded
by sycophants, gophers, deadpan
men and silent painted women –
his mouth puckers, he wants to talk –
*
and words fall out like vomit
unhinged and disjointed, a parody
stream of consciousness whining
through him, gasping through him,
he speaks and speaks and speaks –
*
easily swallowing the air around him:
every word bloats him
and robs oxygen from the lungs
already tight and gasping
of his pale court.
*
‘I won, I am a winner, I hate the dead –
give me back my life, come on come on
you can give me 11,000 little lives
for my big one, 11,000 souls,
I’m worth that
*
at least – make me immortal,
save me, save me, die yourself!’
But his voice is a rasping drone.
Here, nothing saves him
nor the wraiths around him,
*
nor those beyond him, the others,
those he crushed or shrugged off;
here winning and losing
have no currency: it’s the end
of the deal, an eternal lockdown –
*
no reward, no punishment, no change, no glitter, no gold –
just a whisper in the drear
and silence.
Urge not my death to me, nor rub that wound,
I rather wish to live in earth a swain,
Or serve a swain for hire, that scarce can gain
Bread to sustain him, than, that life once gone,
Of all the dead sway the imperial throne
Homer, The Odyssey, Book 11, translated by George Chapman.
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