I wrote a book called ‘The Afterdeath’
With a thousand gory themes,
Of what takes place at your final breath
When you lie in your swirling dreams,
Your body hung by its fingertips
Between here and the place you go,
When the deed is done, and your race is run
Will there be no afterglow?

Will there be no afterglow, I said
With a place you can lay your head,
Up in the clouds and the stars somewhere
On a downy, cloudy bed?
To wake from the sordid human dream
That you lived, three score and ten,
Trying to make your way between
Your hopes and ambitions then.

But always thwarted, you don’t know why
For nothing would come out right,
And always hanging over your head
Are thoughts of that endless night,
That bright intelligence snuffed right out
That learning lost to the air,
Your body locked in a six foot box
In its final death despair.

I wrote of the ones who wake in dread
To the sound of the shovel’s spray,
Tipping that final dirt on you
As your coffin’s hidden away,
You thump and scream in your final dream
Kicking the bottom out,
With the coffin muffling shrieks and screams
When you want them to let you out!

It’s easy, while I am sitting here
To write of a man’s despair,
When he’s in the dark, can’t see a spark
And fighting for gasps of air,
Or maybe rather the sputtering jets
Of the crematorium,
As the box implodes and your body glows
Round your scared cerebellum?

So now that I’ve made you comfortable
Accepting your sad demise,
And the way that they will dispose of you
(Believe me, everyone lies!)
Take heart in the fact you’re not alone
That final terror will be
There at the end with everyone,
Including the author, Me!’

David Lewis Paget