THE LAST POET’S LAST POEM
How love and death are best defined
in terms of intelligence distilled into truth
matters little now that this world is gone
under Gondwanaland, and us too;
but at least we can say we lived our lives
to the full, stretched our potential, knew
the impunity of being true to ourselves, which
was only being what we dreamed we were.
At least we knew love under the stars,
dared to dream, to feel all, to see free.
No archaic-hearted words could fathom
the privation we seem to be about to forego –
and so the cold vacuity of space will grow
emptied of the human form and hang about
like a Mark Rothko painting on the wall of
God forever without any senses to perceive it,
to live it and take it in. – The irresponsible
matter of the elements can reign againe,
like a romance of chemicals and dust –
and I trust that silence will win – but I
thank you for the good times we shared,
the inspiration you gave me to write, though
all our poems were useless for the end
was always going to arrive, marrying
the prelapsarian and the eschatological,
into one ultimate terminal and end-point.
The good book says loss is the mother
of imagery, intimation with death breeds
new truth, but how we will ever know that now
I do not know, and would you like
to see my insect collection, and has
Pooh Bear found his inward God on a plane,
and shall we run away and have a jam?
John Tucker was born in London in 1982 and is now based in Cumbria. He graduated from Lancaster University in 2009 and has had poems published in various webzines including snakeskin and gists and piths.