Skip to main content

After Death Nothing Is - A poem about Lord Rochester

On Lord Rochester: (1648 – 1680)

The Idle Rogue on His Deathbed
Or
After Death Nothing Is

Here I Lay, Lie or Lay an Idle Rogue Some Men May Say
My body wrapped in cere cloths Pissing blood and pus And Spitting Bile
In the Mortal Agony of Not Knowing Whether I meet my God or Another below
Or just go As Some Men Say, Burning, Straight to Hell
The Damned Black-Frocked Bishop Burnet Flaps around My Death Bed
Taking My Confession, Religiously Pecking at me Like a Crow does Carrion
He Faithfully Hopes (Unwisely Say I) To Pluck my Soul Like some tasty Morsel
From this Rotting Putrid, Stinking, Flesh
Confessing to My Idleness, Lasciviousness and Lust
He Assures me will Secure my place in His Heaven, Hell I Do Not Agree!
But I’ll String this Foolish Man along
A Mountebank I will be ‘til Death takes my release
“God’s Teeth” I cry, And He, Like the Confessor He purports to be Cries
 “My Lord God, Thanks be, He is Now Within Thee!”
And Still Despite his exhortations The Chancres and Ulcers Soundly bite and weep
Like some Poxy Laureate Sniffing and Snapping ‘Round a King’s Throne
With his Damned, Obsequious, Still Born, Poetry
Painfully Making my Waking Dying hours A Hell-filled Misery
Charles, My King, My friend, Have I not been Good to thee?
This Good Sweet Life is mine no more, Burnet’s God Take Me!
To His God I Plead: Please Save Me! To His God I Plead: Please Love Me!
Hell’s Teeth I recant: His God Do Not Take Me,
Then must I cry In Mighty Pain Lord, His God Take Me!
(Yet I Still Do Not accept thee)
My Lord, Mine Own God, Jesus, Bishop Burnet’s God, Take Me!
And From this Corporeal pain free me
Heaven’s Hell! All of This Life’s Sweetest Pleasures
Swiving, drinking and sinning Have all been Mine
I have kicked ‘gainst the pricks And yet, And Yet, I do confess
Those pleasures have not all been mine And Mine Alone,
But of all Earth’s Mankind, For only on this subject Burnet and I agree
And for All My Mortal Sins I confess to thee
My God, My Lord Jesus, Help Me!
Now I must Face my Death, It Seems with Bishop Burnet's
Idiotic didactic Misguided Guidance
Now I die, I Expire, I Perish spent of this brief life
Some later observers may write (I say most foolishly)
That I died, My God, In Consonance with Thee
God, Jehovah! Hell’s Teeth! Sweet Jesus!
The pain now torments me
And yet, and yet I die, Heaven’s Hell!
I’m only Thirty-Three.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Protein Man of Oxford Street- Stanley Owen Green.

I wrote this Obituary piece for The Guardian about Stanley Green while I was an undergraduate at Goldsmiths' College.  I contacted The Guardian and asked them if I could submit it for publication. It was sent off to them and I waited in eager anticipation for their reply. It was published on Wednesday January 26th 1994,   the Editor  made no changes or additions except by adding some photographs (the photographs used here are later additions by me): "A Consuming Passion.... Stanley Owen Green who has died aged aged 78, was that tall thin man with steel-rimmed glasses who marched it seemed for an eternity up and down London's Oxford Street. It was his banner that made him famous, held high above his head and proclaiming "LESS LUST FROM PROTEIN" in large white letters. Underneath the banner he endured the taunts of sticky schoolchildren and the spittle of office workers alike, to bring his unique, indeed puzzling message to the people of London. He later wate
3 comments
Read more

The Roswell Returns

“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” As those words echoed around Mission Control in Houston a round of spontaneous applause broke out across the site and in the control room. There were yelps and hollers of triumph echoing around the whole of NASA that momentous day in July 1969. In the Command Module Michael Collins was monitoring the vital controls that kept it orbiting the Moon. He flipped the carbon dioxide uptake switch, looked at the battery charge meters, oxygen levels and closely watched the radar screen. He sat back in his flight chair and watched the instrumentation flick and whirr. He daren’t relax, he didn’t relax at all. He paid great attention to the radar screen as he was commanded to. He had to monitor it for spooks, intruders or ghosts. He knew he was looking for Foo Fighters. They did show up on radar, aircrews had confirmed that as fact. It was how fast they appeared and disappeared that threw most pilots. There had been warnings by the
Post a Comment
Read more

Christmas Gothic - The Sojourn of The Soul

As the man came in from work, he looked on the hall table as he did every night, ostensibly for any letters that had been delivered that day. There were none that day. There was, however, a small parcel wrapped in brown paper. The label on it was addressed to him, ‘To Harry, With Love’ it read. It looked like his wife had bought him a book, which was unusual for her to even go into a book shop let alone buy him a book. He picked it up and felt its weight it was quite a weighty tome. He unwrapped the book and looked at the title: A Goode Wyfe: The Sojourn Of The Soul. He noted the archaic spelling of the title; she had chosen well. It looked very interesting and was certainly very old, the leather binding and the gold lettering on the spine and cover gave that away. It was well thumbed too and the pages fell open on their own.   He looked at the imprint, last imprint 1818, first imprint 1313. He did a quick sum in his head, those two dates added together made 3131, a mirror image of t
Post a Comment
Read more