Tracks all covered with a  flourish

He’d prepared, deliberated

Took a trifle dish on Friday

With a promise of it Monday

That was that.

 

Knowing well that in the meantime

I would not expect to see him,

Knew his time frame int-i-mately

Knew I’d wonder at the trifle

And not him.

 

Instead I invented reasons

For the making of a pudding

Was it company or family?

Or was he on a promise?

Oh, he was.

 

On a promise to himself that is,

He’d lined up pills and cider

Piles and piles of pills and cider

That he polished off in sorrow

Knowing there’d be no tomorrow

 

I’d been to the shop that Monday

Hurried back with Gammon slices

Really fancied them, that evening

When I walked in through the front door

And then stopped.

 

Faced with ashen supplication

From an irritating husband

Saying all the cliched bobbins

People spout in situations

Such as this

 

And I misunderstood at first

And then threw myself hysteric

Crying “grandad, grandad, grandad.”

Till he stopped me with a blue sky

“It’s yer Dad”

 

And then all the tale unravelled

How they said that he’d took tablets

And I howled out loud “The BASTARD!”

Then remembered I had children

And deflated

 

And then scarpered off to see him

Along with my eldest sister

To identify the body

Till a policeman apprehended,

“No. It’s gone”

 

So we went round to my Aunty’s

(that’s his youngest sister)

And smoked spliff

And drank Ice breakers

And grew maudlin then and tearful

and got pissed.

 

Fast forward to that weekend

When the council (in their kindness)

Told us that we’d need to clear out

Before the latest tenants

moved on in.

 

So we wrapped a life in bin bags

There was pitifully little

For a life lived on the bottle

And along the guttered margins

of the world.

 

They’d never even took the mattress

That he’d lain on to expire

And it showed in gory horror

Like a Turin Shroud of vomit,

Shit and Piss.

 

That suicide is filthy dirty

Even preconceived it’s lonely

Even planned in minute detail

It’s abhorrent and it’s awful

And that’s it.