Blood Pressure

Hot diggity
it’s the big red pump that’s going
not the frail vines of the head –
 
that’s what they said he said when he went down,
the big old boy (‘old but looking good!’)
getting ready to be dead.
 
The girls at the fax machine were impressed,
as was the pock-faced boy with the mobile phone
who called the ambulance.
 
No denying as he lay
in the neatness of his creases,
composure of his hair, his chin, his shoes,
 
beneath the quiet hand upon the fidget in his chest,
that this was any other than a lucky end,
a proper construct of an elegant death.
 
To bow out like this! –
after all the worry years and would-be cures and pills –
neat as pie and marbles all intact.
 
Except maybe that little one there,
hot and oily as a dollop of fear
trembling on the lip of the deep dark core,
 
then lumpity lumpity rolling down
vine to loosening vine
with no haste at all.
 
Which surprised him, really, no end.
 

Diane Tang

published in collection, Sideways from the Shore, 2012, Oversteps Books,
ISBN 978-1-906856-28-1;
an earlier version appeared in Children Writers competition anthology