Just Like David Niven

 It’s been a bit of a week

From clear plastic straws up each nostril

To full deep-sea helmet through which you strain to speak

Together we face the nearing impossible

 

Father am I forgiven

Your mask has made me deaf

You look like David Niven

Diving to your death

 

Life is a matter of imagining

The meaning in its moment

Stretched across the wide screen

Like the arrows of the bowmen

 

Suspended for eternity

Above the cosmic ocean

Your dreadful looks could murder

With love and devotion

 

And now round the ring you stagger

Absorbing each and every blow

Before you I see a dagger

When you gotta go you gotta go

 

So suspend the disbeliever

The tank has nothing left

You look like David Niven 

diving to his death

 

The projector beam it flickers

The consultant can’t save you with his bell

It’s nearly time to still your beating ticker

Inside the blue curtained family cell

 

To the hospital we’d driven

Through the forest of unrest

Now you look like David Niven

Plunging to certain death

 

I bought you Private Eye

With a joke about the petrol shortage

Are we there yet? was the punch-line

The joke that pays the mortgage

 

Here comes a candle to light you to bed

Here comes the chopper to chop off your head

Chip chop chip chop

The last man’s dead.