Where there's a will
there's a funeral
death is a fact of life
a grave undertaking
for a mortician
and one day some day
you and I
will wake up dead
hopefully the lifetime led
was of our own making
too late for looking back
no regrets and yet
it's appalling
when we wind up
in a winding sheet
waiting on that beir
aside from six feet under
where do we go
from here?
Some say, 'Heaven,'
some say, 'Hell,' oh well,
by then our goose is cooked, wagon fixed,
and we'll never know 'til it's too late
as they've punched our ticket,
cleaned our clock and wiped our slate.
Categories:
winding sheet, death, funeral, grave, humorous,
Form: Rhyme
A musky, burnt haze sears slowly into my nostrils.
The twilight hour pulses steadily, bathing stark walls in an eerie gloom.
Too awake to drift to sleep, yet too tired to drag my bones off this sinking mattress.
Thoughts cyclone like a tsunami within a withdrawn mind,
picking at scabs; the half-life of my darkness pools in red droplets.
Licking the wounds, the taste of metallic and melancholy blends.
Loneliness wraps its arms around my dejected shoulders like a winding sheet.
A howling wind rattles the paper-thin glass making up my windows,
as I ponder how I became the living dead.
Traumas poisoned my sanity,
slowly paranoia replaced reason,
delusions became my nightly bedfellow,
whispering sweet unpleasantries into tainted ears,
leaving hallucinatory trinkets in my repeating nightmares.
The world is shrinking, withering,
yet as I am becoming paralyzed by fear, I am unequipped to stop it.
Like a freight train derailed,
bellowing at full speed towards the inevitable,
I too am racing at the speed of light towards oblivion.
Categories:
winding sheet, angst, dark, death, gothic,
Form: Free verse
Pensive they sit, and roll their languid eyes,
Nibble their toast, and cool their tea with sighs,
Or else forget the purpose of the night,
Forget their tea -- forget their appetite.
See with cross'd arms they sit -- ah! happy crew,
The fire is going out and no one rings
For coals, and therefore no coals Betty brings.
A fly is in the milk-pot -- must he die
By a humane society?
No, no; there Mr. Werter takes his spoon,
Inserts it, dips the handle, and lo! soon
The little straggler, sav'd from perils dark,
Across the teaboard draws a long wet mark.
Arise! take snuffers by the handle,
There's a large cauliflower in each candle.
A winding-sheet, ah me! I must away
To No. 7, just beyond the circus gay.
'Alas, my friend! your coat sits very well;
Where may your tailor live?' 'I may not tell.
O pardon me -- I'm absent now and then.
Where might my tailor live? I say again
I cannot tell, let me no more be teaz'd --
He lives in Wapping, might live where he pleas'd.'
Categories:
winding sheet, poetry,
Form: Blitz
What becomes of crazy mixed up kids fifty years on?
They become crazy mixed up elderly he-goats.
I am in part a Protestant,
In part I am a Jew,
But then I am a Catholic,
on off-days an atheist, too.
I’m something of a socialist
and pay my union dues
from well-laundered Mafia funds.
Psst! Have you got your share, too?
If they’d put me down in Ulster,
I’d have blown my brains out with a gun,
Just to keep ‘em guessing
Which faction in me won.
You can call me all the names you like.
A Prot, a wop, a yid.
In earlier days I used to be
a crazy mixed-up kid.
And I sure still am baffled
by this crazy mixed-up world,
and don’t expect enlightenment
ere my winding sheet is furled.
But there’s just one thing I’d like to know
Before the day I die.
Which part of me is all the rest,
And which part of me is I?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hD7q1xg2jQ
Categories:
winding sheet, crazy, humor, kid,
Form: Burlesque
They become crazy mixed up elderly he-goats.
I am in part a Protestant,
In part I am a Jew,
But then I am a Catholic,
on off-days an atheist, too.
I’m something of a socialist
and pay my union dues
from well-laundered Mafia funds.
Psst! Have you got your share, too?
If they’d put me down in Ulster,
I’d have blown my brains out with a gun,
Just to keep ‘em guessing
Which faction in me won.
You can call me all the names you like.
A Prot, a wop, a yid.
In earlier days I used to be
a crazy mixed-up kid.
And I sure am still baffled
by this crazy mixed-up world,
and don’t expect enlightenment
ere my winding sheet is furled.
That is, I'd like to know
Before the day I die.
Which part of me is all the rest,
And which part of me is I?
Categories:
winding sheet, old, , atheist,
Form: Rhyme
In the shadow of this tree,
Judas mapped his misery,
But saw no finger-post, save one:
A beckoning oblivion.
So up he climbed, with labored breath,
To where he could devise his death.
The twisted tree, by time distressed,
Would ratify his wretchedness,
And let him fall — his loss complete,
The seamless sky his winding sheet.
Categories:
winding sheet, bible, christian, myth, mythology,
Form: Couplet
fetishized lament
echoed
from colourfully besmeared winding sheet
devouring luminosity
become my pivotal infringement
vigorous luminosity
somethin' s wrong with her transcript
-they said, and put me behind iron pipes
my name dawned divested
and encapsulated in frame
of long time inhumed language
thus
soul
elastane woven
bends
every time words clash at those
indifferent barricades
this circle of life is fuc***
it cringes in parts it shouldn't
Danaans gift tried to conceal scenery
of birth given screenplay
they failed to excrement that light
clash became my attribution
yet they didn't let me to keep
any of that ordeal dust
they left me empty-handed
but emptiness brings happiness when filled
outage is divergent level of melancholy
undertone of this vanity named it pain
I call it a way of life
you got a thousand and one battle
war is mine
Categories:
winding sheet, prejudice,
Form: Free verse
I wore fear
like a winding sheet,
leaving behind trails
of dead dreams
I held hope in my hands
and weeping, it slid
through my fingers
evaporating to naught
I undulated to music
praying for redemption
within the passage,
I was left bereft, still, taciturn
but by relinquishing velleity
into the firmament,
and smashing my glass heart
for the loves' of my life
I've begun to believe
in miracles again,
I am finding the way
that comforts my soul
A shimmering
lavender light,
shines with serenity
burns out the fear
and builds a blaze of hope,
by loving without doubt
the whips of regret
are now unmoving
fires have been stoked,
this mystery now has élan
I am flesh, reborn out
and into this life, once again.
Categories:
winding sheet, hope, light,
Form: Free verse
Journeys, Translation of Etiemble’s tercets: Voyages by T. Wignesan
For André Gâteau
(End rhyme scheme: aab, ccd, aab, eed in the original, the first and third tercets beginning
with “Pour vous…” and constituting one complex sentence each. One would do well to bear
in mind in this poem that Etiemble was the foremost authority on Arthur Rimbaud’s poetry.)
For you all over I laid out
my oases, all their date palms
in the tiresome desert without wells,
where the salts of nitrous valleys,
for you* only and your hollow hips
squeaked with the leaps of camel calves.
For you only I stretched out
the fine lace of the poplars
over the blue shirt of the nights
and scoured out of this bone
the winding sheet of dead stars
a place to lie as long as mine.
* “tu”: second person “you”.
© T. Wignesan – Paris, 2014
Categories:
winding sheet, voyage,
Form: Dramatic Monologue
I’m glad of April rain,
Keeping us indoors
Inside our rattled window pane
While the night storm pours.
The rain’s a winding sheet,
Shrouding up the night;
Inside we drink and talk and eat
By a fire built bright.
Categories:
winding sheet, love
Form: Verse