A RHYME FOR STUCK

Make sense of this if you can

I need a rhyme for stuck, thought the poet.

He sat in his chair with his laptop on his knee, and frowned. Sometimes the bright word just wouldn’t come, and this time he only had seven lines in which to tell the world the one truth that dominated all others.

He was going to die before midnight and he wanted his fans, if he had any, to know the biggest truth of them all. A truth he knew so very well that it felt as if it had been burned into his brain. And that was about love.

He had lived a long life, too long some thought, especially if you believed in the three score and ten figure placed on human life expectancy. Ages ago, longer ago than he cared to try to remember, though he did quite often find his memory nudging towards that time as he dozed wearily in this very chair or lay in his bed after dark, wracked with mental pain and not knowing what day it was, but ages ago he had been a boy. Short grey trousers, memories of those were what took him back, with buttons missing from the fly and pockets with holes in them because he kept pointed things buried deep for safety, they were the key to that past.

“And when God made us he decided that we should endure his love for three score years and ten,” the teacher had said before picking on a boy at random and making him cry, if the boy was lucky with words and if not, with a bamboo cane.

Three score years and ten? They were up and done for me with a decade and more to endure, he thought

Why did he say endure? Is it love if it has to be endured?

I’ll know soon enough, when I reach the golden kingdom up the endless stairs to Heaven…

Not that I believe there can possibly be any such place. But if there is, if those endless stairs are a metaphor for something else, a struggle, maybe, a begging for forgiveness, anything really…

He stared with unseeing eyes at the words on his laptop screen. There had been a time when he’d found this writing game easy, though more than enough so called critics said it was rubbish. But why would a poet write rubbish? And anyway, why should one man’s thoughts be more rubbishy than another’s?

Why is the floor so hard? And why can’t he find a rhyme for stuck?

It’s no fun being old, there’s precious little joy in waking up in the morning and aware only of a misted monotonous plain of another day stretching before you… stuck in an endless parade of identical misted plains, and this day, today, seems to have lasted for months.

He couldn’t really get out of the house. He ought to, he knew that, and would have done when Rosie was alive, but she’d died half a decade ago and he was on his own now that the twins had found their own lives, and going out with the paraphernalia of his mobility scooter and its battery needing charging when he got back home… it was all too much. And then there was the walking stick he had to take with him, all clutter, all signifying that he’d already had too much life.

And, of course, the way the rhymes wouldn’t come any more.

But today, tonight before midnight, he was going to die. He’d decided that. He’d already started the process, an overdose of this or that medication, two tablets instead of one, and then two more for luck, and then a fifth. Hours ago he’d started swallowing them, hours ago that seemed like months...

There’s a rhyme for stuck… luck! Not that at my age I’ve got any luck. Not unless you can decide that every day you live is another slice of luck, grey monotonous luck…

And why is the floor so cold?

Once he had got out, even after Rosie passed away and the twins were in homes of their own, and old women had smiled and nodded to him as they strolled past him, old women who were younger than he was. And their smiles were sort of sympathetic.

We know where you’re going and we’ll be joining you next year or the year after, see if we don’t, plucky old dears on our way to the shops to buy fine silk stockings for Saturday nights at the Spread Eagle down the road, don’t you admire our pluck…

And that was another rhyme for stuck!

With any luck he wouldn’t be stuck here, in this chair and mourning dear Rosie much longer, not that he was really mourning her. He could saunter down to the Spread Eagle and buy drinks all round and laugh and joke with the old dears, they’d like that and so would he. And maybe Stan and Sal, his little angels, would walk in or ride in on their tricycles...

But maybe not. He could feel the difference the overdoses of medication were making. The pain was less, thank Heavens for that, and anyway the twins had left their tricycles behind...

I’ll take another dose, they make me feel so grand, like an old duck wallowing on the lake of life, and slowly sinking in, a sad old duck with bedraggled feathers and a broken beak…

But why is the floor so dusty?

He couldn’t help it. There was another rhyme for stuck! Duck!

One thing he’d never fancied eating was duck. He liked looking at the creatures, he always had, and Rosie had said how daft he was, happy to eat fluffy little lambs gambling in green fields, and never taste a duck… But then, Rosie had eaten anything that came to hand and never put an inch onto her waist.

She’d been lucky, had Rosie, lucky to live, lucky to be beautiful, lucky to die without suffering one little bit, lucky to go to sleep one night with a smile on her face and never wake up, just lie there smiling. And he’d loved her… hadn’t he loved her! And she’d said that she loved him too!

Though that wasn’t so easy for me to believe… if she loved me like she said she did she was unique in the world. She wasn’t one of those other women who had treated me as if I was muck. And there had been a few. Jane had been like that, Jane and her stuck up ways that always said that she knew he was muck…

Another rhyme! They were coming now as if time was running out, swallow another pill, take two and then a third, close your eyes, wait for death, hear the doorbell ring like a sodden echo from another world, dim yet insistent, not there yet there. Stand up and hope to get there before whoever’s calling gives up and goes, it would be nice to see one more face before he left the world, nice to hear one more voice before his end.

And see one more lovely smile…

And the bell rings again. The door leading out of the front room into the passage is wobbling, like things do in films when they want to suggest time passing.

And there are lights everywhere. Suddenly. He can’t afford to pay the electricity bills so why are the lights all on? Or maybe they’re not lights. Is it a leakage from Heaven? The bright place at the top of a nothing staircase that never did exist? And is that Rosie standing there, waiting for me, lifting her skirt so I can praise her legs like I used to, and she’d giggle, but in Heaven? Would the mighty powers of eternity approve of her legs up there? Aren’t legs forbidden? Doesn’t the Great Power loathe all good things, like legs?

The door might have been wobbling, but he couldn’t reach it. He never would, he knew that. It was just receding before him and the floor was moving in on him as he found himself drifting, no, not drifting but plunging towards it, and the bright lights were flickering out, the lights from Heaven or Hell or whatever existed in the Afterlife and he suddenly, shockingly, surprisingly, knew no more.

Someone must have heard him fall because they broke the door in and looked at him where he lay.

The floor was cold and dusty and looked so hard.

“Crikey,” muttered one of the two who had called to see him, “we should have come before, Sal, he must have been there for, I don’t know, ages… He’s just a skeleton in stinking rags… better call the police though an ambulance wouldn’t be much use. He must have been dead for months…”

“Read this, Stan,” whispered the second, “his laptop’s come to life and look at what he was writing…”

“Crikey,” breathed Stan.

“I’m in a mist and here I’m stuck, dreaming of love and one last…” read Sal.

“That doesn’t leave much to the imagination! Dad, you were a very sad old man…” murmured Stan.

“But he couldn’t find a rhyme for stuck,” sighed Sal. She looked at her twin. “He must have meant to write luck but ran out of time,” she smiled.

© Peter Rogerson 27.04.22

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