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The London Necropolis Railway
One day the dead outnumbered the living.Whole streets wore black wreaths.
Corpses rose from the earth when it rained.
They erected monuments to themselves,
Egyptian pyramids, gothic temples in granite and marble.
They travelled in horse-drawn carriages
and wore their finest clothes.
Even those we thought were one of us
took on a quality we came to know,
the blood-splattered cough, the bloodless cheek.
It became fashionable to be dead.
Artists chose delicate models and painted them
swooning in their deathbeds, or if still alive, in mourning.
Poets drank absinthe in bars that looked like coffins
and kept a vial of laudanum under the bed.
Black glistened during the day
and glowed at night.
After a while we tired of their cold embrace
and banished them to the country.
From Waterloo to Woking,
they filled the carriages with their velvets and mahoganies,
the curtains drawn on the poor house
and the factories, the railway that spidered
through London, and gave way to green,
to clean air and cloudless sky.
There they finally lie in the shade of the trees,
while we go about our lives.
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