It escaped me again: the day of your death. Yes,
That matters. I was on a train outside London
On the tragic day that news fell. As if it were a cloud
Drawn back to Earth, containing your last
And next exhalations, to be exchanged for stars
And sky sailing above another terrain far tales tell.
You were always the great living myth to men like me
From the suburbs and while your origins were urban
They also contained wizardry; Welsh from Dylan
Thomas of course, the first to rouse and raise
Writing’s fire under the youthful John Henley
To stoke each scorched sentence of your work’s
Great and grand commentary. Perhaps you are too
Important to miss; more than a cultish name from the 60s,
Who unlike your own peers kept peering into the public heart
To boil blood inside the Buckingham shed, or the Downing
Street Grotto, where they probably dine on David Icke’s lizards,
Passing piss as they lick them, or split them in twain
As floors thud with oppressions fat shoe, from which
You peeled the polish in an ocean of poems, for if you
Had been God your word flood would have doused
And drowned sin at every corner and quarter.
Your old graffiti was more than word art on a wall.
They were tattoos bleeding in, scoring brick to burn brightly
And those old Ladbroke locations are where poets
Should wail now and call for such wisdom to warp
The societal line most have followed. You rewrote this city
And you made it rhyme, sing and scan. ‘Joyless work
gives you cancer’ You said. And you were right.
We’ve all got it. ‘Use your birth certificate as a credit card’
Viva! ‘God won’t fuck you if you’re fucked up’ Yes! That’s Its plan.
To remain celibate, or unwilling at least to grant
Any more love to our species as we pound the planet
Much like a brutal cock does in porn, intent on revenge
While no longer cognizant of the reason, as war is sex
For a system whose emporers clothes would look threadbare
Even if they were worn. So while I never forget your birthday
Or your deathday too, like my parents, this year, amidst
Matter of utter unconcern it slipped past: that seventh
reminder of loss of that magic mouth and bright body;
Of that halo of hair, and the cackle, one part wheeze,
Then song – of your laugh, and of your inscrutable stare
And the nose repeated in China, your eldest; of the physical
Self, then, that absence, as with all who are dead
Makes fun fast; for grief always starves. It is the soul’s
Secret diet, and yet, I, like so many have your beautiful cards
And envelopes and the work that makes paper sing,
Whether bound in a book, or by photocopy; whether watched,
Or remembered, your books became beacons, rather like
Thomas, or Blake, Burroughs, Beckett, Pinter, Byron or Shelley,
Lorca, and Yeats, Williams. Bidding us on until Eternity
Makes it’s edit. One word from you was pure parchment.
But Heathcote, from first to last breath you kept giving.
Writing to rise, each thought fighting. In your art lay
Our answer. So let our legacy be your
Millions.
David Erdos 12th July 2024
.