when you’re dead, you’re dead / with one definitive snip of the thread / away you float / head first down eternity’s capacious throat / or / maybe death is just a door / maybe you die and you go somewhere else / your consciousness melts / and you get sucked into another realm / Valhalla, maybe, with Odin posing at the helm / or Nirvana / Jannah, Trāyastriṃśa / Aukumea / variations on the idea of the holy layer / domes & levels / supervised by countless angels & devils / where finally you might get rewarded / for all those good deeds you meticulously hoarded / or punished for those you forgot / and pitched headfirst to somewhere hot / where all the tormented entities / gargle lava & prod each other with horrible utilities / like long-handled toasting forks / (according to the most reliable reports)

fact is / no-one understands it / as Shakespeare rightly pointed out in Hamlet / death is an undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns / or blogs about their concerns / no pics on Flickr / Instagram or Twitter / or anything that might shed light on the guff / behind all that Life Ever After stuff / which is probably why these myths are so persistent / with so many contradictory versions co-existent

anyway / at the end of the day / it’ll probably just be like before I was born / people shopping and mowing the lawn / or things a little more obnoxious / with me, happily unconscious / circling the earth in a random atomic cook-up / just waiting for my mum & dad to hook-up