One Day, It Will Be Ackroyd

I find out in a flurry
Of poorly thought-out movie allusions
They carry the news like pall-bearers
‘Busted, mate’
‘Bustin’ makes him feel bad’
‘He really is a ghost now’
Tom, a veteran at text obituaries, says:
‘Apparently they found him with a phone in his hand.
Who was he gonna call?’
But Joe weighs in late with:
‘My mother-in-law is a little… high strung’
Which, though irrelevant,
Is the only Driving Miss Daisy reference,
Meaning he wins.

It’s one choc chip in an otherwise raisiny day –
Clocks grind like winches
I find it hard to load the dishwasher

We always said fame is a hen’s egg filled with fog
Those nights we ran amok
Snapping the noses off plaster saints
When it was
Knock knock Monkhouse
Knock knock Beadle
Knock knock Hussein
How our scorn prowed through the gloom
Like a distress flare
So by the doomy dawn
We were damp with cooled hubris
And huddling to get warm

Now, in the aftermath,
I regret my smug distance
My insistence their deaths are none of my business
I know the jumper will some day snag
And unravel
That if it can be Ackroyd
Then one day, it will be Murray
One day, it will be Culkin
One day, it will be T

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