Death Magazine by Matthew Haigh

 Buy it from Bookshop.org and support local booksellers 

Matthew Haigh prefaces his collection with this quote from J. G. Ballard “How do we make sense of this ceaseless flow of advertising and publicity, news and entertainment, where presidential campaigns and moon voyages are presented in terms indistinguishable from the launch of a new candy bar or deodorant?”

This poem speaks powerful of a grief that is awkward, so much powerfully unsaid...

What Will Your Sims Do Now?

Like a good nephew, I save your computer

from the skip’s slew of lifelong wreckage,

lug its black lake-weight back to my room

even thought the tower is now a humming grave.

Inside still live the pixel kids

you abandoned to a timeless

paradise, still frolicking poolside,

spurting gibberish, clownish, in a summer

that will never end. They know nothing

of the absent god act you’ve pulled, these tiny

Adams and Eves in cherry-print kaftans.

I feed and clothe and shower them, these strange

skin cells you’ve shed in your swift exit,

my head haloed by the screen’s heaven-

blue, the way yours must have been as you

crafted your craved reflection.

Here is the candy-haired

mohawk girl modelled on your ideal.

I push her around her little kitchen,

fingers lingering on the keys that yours

last touched. Her chip pan has caught fire.

The girl’s face bursts open with tears.

Scorched walls. Her kitchen is

ruined. I can’t console her.