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 telephone, the typewriter and the confused.

My life seems to be littered with conversations such as the one told below. If you look on my blog you’ll see ‘Hypo or Hyper’ and ‘The Blackbird in the Garden’ and the triumph that was ‘The Telephone’. All are based on the other person’s misunderstanding of a content of my life, or their life. I sometimes, in fact often, continue conversations purely for the humour that results from them.   # Ooooowh, what’s that noise? It’s just my phone. #Sounds like an old typewriter Yep, it is. It’s for my texts. #That must take a long time. What? #Typewriting texts. It doesn’t type them, it’s only a notification. #Mine is a ping, like a microwave. Mine was too. I changed it so I would know I have a text. #But you must have to wait a while for it to be typed. No, it’s just a notification noise. I downloaded it. #How does it send texts then if it uses a typewriter. It doesn’t use a typewriter, it’s only the notification sound. #Mine just pings and the message ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Music Teacher

I   recollect aged about 10 having an argument, a strong disagreement,   with the music teacher at my Primary School. Iin fact it was one of many that I had with her. I don’t why but she just irritated the young David; she was not a soft teacher, she had no hesitation in throwing you out of the room. Possibly that was it, there was physical retribution taken, she was one of the few teachers that didn’t mete out the ruler or cane. I had to test her. Of course I did, it was natural for me to do so. Anyway it started out with her plonking away on the piano as she always did at the start of a ‘lesson’; lesson being a loose term for her didactic approach to teaching, we had to enjoy music, we had no choice. I did in fact love music, I still do.I just found her approach less than welcoming. As she plonked away on the piano for a few minutes we took our places on the floor.   She then dramatically stood up in the way teachers with an artistic bent do a...
3 comments
Read more