Post morning, pre-mortem
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I promised the ghost of Meleager
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I would marry Deianira
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So I went to Calydon where Oeneus was king
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Stopping to fight the river god Achelous on the way
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I won when I broke his horn
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In the pyramid at Giza
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I become lost in a succession of chambers
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I am blind like Homer yet strangely I still see
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Screenprinted cows and silver foil
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Gigantic ants scuttling on a motherboard
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While I sew with Ariadne, the white rabbit
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Scurries away down next door’s burrow
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Two in the afternoon
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In an ephemeral hospital
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The radio therapy ward is filled with tiny lights
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A pile of dim barely perceptible earth in a heap
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And spiritual distant music
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At two in the afternoon
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I wander in Venice with Von Aschenbach
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Seeking a lost child in a red cape
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Coughing blood
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And the swine of Circe come running to their deaths
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Maddened by the singing of the sirens
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Winter fog rolling in off the lido
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Sometimes a god crosses your path here unannounced
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In the pyramid the mummy grows mouldy at the last
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At two in the afternoon
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Haile Selassi orders a stamp collection to be brought
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Lifts the stamps with tweezers and places them back
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I leave him to his pastime
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For time will probably pass regardless
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I strike out from Alexandria to the Athenian apartment
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Of my ninth year
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Lycabetus blasted in monastic rock
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The hot mountains snow capped with marble
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Dust storms over Psychico
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Lime Cordial on Eucalyptus Square
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Where is it now?
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And where also my Parisian child bride?
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Into the sea they flow
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With Villon’s medieval snow
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Four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon
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Three at evening,
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Flat on our backs by dawn
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Two in the afternoon
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Gracchus the hunter joins me now
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He offers me the oars and I row
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From one Greek island to the next
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While Gracchus writes, if it be possible so deep in death to write
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The secrets of the world
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In the margins of a little girl’s spidery pencilled Spice Girls scrapbook
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Picked up from the ground in Hackney
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The crows of Tokyo are sombre umbrellas
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Flapping atop telegraph poles in the rainy season
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A writer hurries by dressed in a restrained check pattern
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Composing in his head the 31st syllable of a tanka
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Leigh Bowery is sitting at his sewing machine
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Corpulent, pale eyed
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Flash forward: he is stammering «a few more days»
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As they threaten to turn off his life support machine
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And the ECG bleep goes spastic
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Slavic women decorate their anguish with ullulations
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The mongolian terror is fresh in their memories
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Grim dawn comes from the east bringing carrion
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Over the grass of the highlands
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Gulls girn, denouncing all culprits
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The skull prickles, the hairs rise
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Poe indulges in voluptuous melancholia, polysyllabic
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Like the grass the horsemen know
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We perish
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For me it’s 2PM
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For the moment life goes on
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And the Minotaur plays Nintendo
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Basho squats before the emperor
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The former thirteen and a half year old genius
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Exposes himself in a subway passage
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To a halfwit girl he scares half out of her wits
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As Brahms completes his Requiem
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Shakespeare and the Bishop Of Winchester
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Are teasing the fraus in the stews of Southwark
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They are baiting bears in the nearby pit
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The arena has been flooded
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Shakespeare and the Bishop take their seats for the re-enactment of
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The sea battle between the Genji and Haike
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The imperial boat is already on fire
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The battle was lost centuries before
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Deianira agrees to be my wife
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We purchase an ivy green Lexus, flagship of the range
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And live, discreetly luxurious, in a premier shell loft conversion in the
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Hollywood hills
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The converted observatory at Palo Alto
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Three at evening,
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Flat on our backs by dawn
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For me it’s 2PM
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For the moment life goes on
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Four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon
|
Three at evening
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Flat on our backs by dawn … |