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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.

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