#

Every day someone #s out of life,
someone once worshipped, adored,
blu-tacked and wall-postered
into a temporary immortality.

Remember the shock?
Hearing in the bus queue
that The King was dead?
None of that long live stuff:
Johnny’s lèse majesté had already
topped the charts.

Or maybe someone had left
a paid-for newspaper on the seat,
open at the obituaries
which no-one paid for then.
Elvis in the Telegraph,
and Bolan in the Times,
grief and shock at one remove.

Each retweet, like and teary face
makes immortals out of midgets,
and vice-versa, removing
the glamour of the inscrutable,
the un-knowable hero.

Everyone is ours,
owned by virtue of our signalling
that we even know a fraction
of Scott’s debt to Jacques
and why artists make what they must
and not what the public wants,
whatever Weller roars
about entertainment.

I just was not made for these times.