‘Elegy for an Unremarkable Man’ by Shaun C. Duncan

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Elegy for an Unremarkable Man

Poor Niel is dead. He’d been off sick since May.
Cancer, they said, as if we couldn’t guess,
And, since we didn’t know what words to say,
We stayed away. If pressed, we might confess
We’d turned our jellied backs to his distress,
Acting from some vain, primitive belief
It might ward off those dreams of sleeplessness
When for ourselves we lie awake in grief.
His death, when it arrived at last, was a relief.

We’re left to wonder what it’s like to die;
They say the drugs can wash away all pain,
But still, it must be boring to just lie
And wait, while doctors patiently explain
That slow starvation isn’t inhumane
And any further care would just postpone
Your great demotion to that dark domain.
How awful it must be to die alone;
You’d hope the nurses let him hold on to his phone.

He had no faith as far as we could tell
Beyond those platitudes we all recite,
And not a word he proffered could dispel
The air of middle-class suburbanite:
Well-educated, earnest and polite
But something of an affable cliché
And quite the opposite of recondite.
Most liked him well enough but none could say
His loss aroused strong feelings in us either way.

And yet he sometimes smiled as if amused
At something we’d not understood, and in
The margins of the minutes, unperused,
His scribbled sketches spoke to discipline
And hinted at some hidden harlequin
Crouching behind the bland exterior.
Like us, he likely lived his best within
From fear we’d mock his dreams as dreary, or
Simply because he found this world inferior.

So now lost friends and fellow workers file
Into his final conference room, a space
Where emptiness is sacralized in style
Suited to governance more so than grace,
As if banality might best efface
The fear of all that black, and as we find
Our seats, a sober smile or limp embrace
For those we pass, we cannot leave behind
The mundane world and its demands upon the mind.

The celebrant is late, and so we wait
On plastic chairs and stare at tiny screens.
Then one observes this self-same real estate
Was once a place which fixed old fax machines
And such condolence wrought from pathos means
Much more to us than grieving’s pantomime:
A life reduced to trite, curated scenes;
Perhaps a poem built from awkward rhyme;
And, finally, some song he said he liked one time.

Then, after sandwiches and one light beer
It’s back to work as his remains are burned
And all the silly things which he held dear,
Those scraps of happiness his ennui earned
As compensation for a life adjourned
Are left beside the road. Then, once the home
Where he had lived alone has been returned
To ashes, on that land a honeycomb
Of gleaming tenements will bubble up like foam.

To stumble from the premises like this
And leave the universe without a scar,
To slip from coffee breaks to the abyss
When you’ve lived half your life inside your car
And never told another who you are,
Seems an obscenity, a tasteless joke,
Like a vacation to an abattoir,
And any cheap excuses we invoke
Will soon dissolve into the empty sky like smoke.

Yet Adam was a gardener, so they say
And, though that Paradise sounds rather nice,
It still demanded work from day to day.
And while our pride insists a higher price
Be placed upon our selfish sacrifice,
We’re gifted moments pregnant with surprise,
When all around us seems to shine like ice;
We look upon the world with ancient eyes
As something small and sad inside us briefly dies

And, as we step into that ground we share
With all of Nature’s gaze, we might sense one
Who waits behind us and become aware
That we have walked, backs turned against the sun,
Complaining to our shadows. Niel is done
With all that now. May he be satisfied
To leave behind those lives left unbegun
And may the rest of us forget our pride,
Knowing that better men than we have also died.

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Shaun C. Duncan is a picture framer and fine art printer who lives in Adelaide, South Australia.