For Stephen Hawking
Two years, they told him, the medics
To put his ill-starred house in order
And await his date with formaldehyde
And a fine funeral cortege
On the tail wind of his cremation dust
But, starting
From the third rung of his ladder
The one pronounced rotten, his
One-way route to ‘cad’avenue,
He let drop a defiant song
Not to the medics. To gravestone sculptors
To epitaph poets
To wreath price bargain hunters
Hagglers over memorial haiku
For he was seeing a gem between the seventh and eight stars
You’ve done your best but your time’s up
They’d insisted,
But he stayed on, and on and on
As he sealed an apprenticeship with the orbs
Plaguing their prognosis with
Fifty three years of extra life
aihuomaimminentriver 