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Paul McGrane - Death is always asking me for poems

Well Versed is edited by Jody Porter

Death is always asking me for poems
Paul McGrane

Death is always asking me for poems,
jealous of the time I spend on politics
and love. It’s not what she needs from
this relationship, she says. The juicy
death she dangles I find so hard to resist.
Like the girl who lost her mother’s hand,
the man who threw his baby from the tower.
The more she demands the more I decline,
even when we reach an anniversary. She’s
tried to simplify the deal, sends me handy
rhyming words for murder, a long list
of lives she’ll claim are accidents of birth
or accidents. She knows that when the living
have read how she must feel she will be happy.  

 

 

Paul McGrane is the co-founder of Forest Poets in Walthamstow, and The Poetry Society Membership Manager. In 2016 he was Highly Commended in the YorkMix Poetry Competition and Longlisted in the South Bank Poetry Competition.

Well Versed is edited by Jody Porter ([email protected])
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