Funeral City Passeggiata
Funeral City Passeggiata
for Peadar O Grady
Here we are, every last one of us, at precisely eight pm,
taking our Saturday walk, a hundred thousand strong
in shades of grey and black. How admirable!
What a fabulously solemn time we are having at our funeral.
Dead mothers. Dead fathers. Dead lovers. Dead children.
Dead cats in cashmere ganseys.
Dead dogs in leather hats.
How beautiful! How beautiful! How beautiful we are!
The policemen so proud to be upright and dead
and beating dead gypsies and junkies to death.
The girls with the surgical tits
and the mannequin heads
are a thousand years old
and ten thousand years dead.
Death’s only got four black stallions
to trample the planet
but in here he zooms around the polished cobbles
mitteleuropean style, high on Moët
and snorting dead South Americans
behind the tinted windows of a tank-like SUV.
Tinted, mind. We don’t condone getting publically out-of-it.
It’s just not the done thing at our kind of ceremony.
Dead native citizens never compromise on public dignity.
Discos and bars we find far too lively,
but we get tips from both Charons’s
for our black-tie restaurants
where our rot-green crusaders
serve pestilential pumpkin pie and swinish offal
to our dooming violinists and our soprano banshees.
The headless politicans round here don’t stink any worse
for being dead and digesting dead donkeys.
Anyway everyone gets to be political when they’re corpses,
Or else we’re dead actors and actresses.
We’re political impressarios fucking wannabe popstars and actresses
then burning or drowning or shooting them dead.
Dead tarts are a speciality,
imported deep-freeze in the back of an artic
from the scariest locations
to which we trade the mines and guns
and plots we cook-up in our warring universities
where our stone-head students earn their killer phds.
And the Mayor. You should see her!
She’s so cool. She’s so hetro. She’s so dead.
She deadens everything.
She is the fucking deadest of the dead.
She collects the death tax
and oversees the constant digging
of our sacrificial migrant chaingangs.
Don’t bleat- it stops their childen begging
and keeps the conquered fuckers fit
for hanging, and don’t even try
to dig our dead rebel teens,
so ice-hearted and gorgeous,
just tune your ass in to our Imitation Dead Big Brother
and watch them sneering,
see them neck and pair off
in the archways. Such choreography.
Such lucky kids! They never got born to begin with.
Carbon copies of their dead teenage grandparents
from the swingless early fifties.
Jerry Lee Lewis never set fire to anything here.
Neither did the sixties. Neither did anything.
Nothing has ever happened here except us being dead.
It’s a giant morgue with freezing empty theatres and cinemas,
a castellated tomb with a lake-sized moat,
an artificial island grave.
It’s like we’re miles beneath an invisible mountain inside an unreachable cave.
We bear it well. We’re getting on all the same in our deaths.
We stiffen, then move on. Forward! Strength!
Let’s grit our bony lips,
dye our undead hair again,
repaint our ever-growing fingernails,
and watch our deaths accumalate,
because death is the surest investment,
the most profitable bond of state,
one that’s been expanding exponentially
since the universe began.
Cash our deathstocks in
when the stars have died
is our retirement plan,
when every atom in the galaxy
floats away into a seperate infinity,
all seperately dead.
We’ll each get death
with compound interest,
a trillion trillion little deaths.
For we have our valhallas too,
we have dead theology,
the teleology of dead.
So get lost you living scumbags
with filthy germinating breath.
Die like us right here right now
or we’ll pitch you from the battlements.
To us the timeless winter still-life of the courtyards!
To us deserted parks and playgrounds!
To us the cracking marble passageways!
To us the vast sarcophagal doll-house interiors!
To us the invincible stopped clocktowers!
To us the unbreakable glass of the shopfronts
where all the most desirable murderers’ names
are on continous display,
and where we will always be caught
pulling up to watch ourselves
passing right in, through and beyond ourselves
in tall, coffin-shaped mirrors
every Saturday evening at 8pm.
Then we stroll on murmuring
a hundred thousand strong
in furs of grey and black
on these pavements we laid broad enough
so we never ever have to touch
our exclusively dead neighbours.
Our exclusively dead selves.
The very best.
How beautiful!
How beautiful!
How beautiful we are!
Every last one of us.