Mortality

Standing there in the gloom

Of an average Belfast day

I watched my mum on her knees

Holding his head, in such a way

As to become a temporary

Skull and skin

A vain attempt

To hold it in

His blood, his brains

Blood that was pissing out his veins

You're never too young to see death

You're never too young to die

For life is just a happening

That happens for a while

I don't know if he had plans

I found out later he had a wife

Like i found out later he had died

Ran out of blood, ran out of life

I must admit it bust me

It bust my teenage mind

He was just a chimp in a uniform

In the

Wrong country

Wrong place

Wrong time

Even if you mean the world to someone

That doesn't change the world

Doesn't change the way it works

This existence into which we've been hurled

I know that I learnt something true

Something I could not forget

That life is a bit of a gamble

If you choose to bet, or not,

It matters none

You're in it for a while

And then you're gone

You're never too young to see death

You're never too young to die

For life is just a happening

That happens for a while

Yet it seems I'm only betting

With the small change of my soul

Hedging bets, never getting

The diamonds from the coal

Or enough oxygen from the air

Breathing with these asthmatic lungs

Knowing everyone else's lyrics

Not singing my own songs

It's like the hurled-ness

Was freewheeling

But I put the brakes on

To slow it down, to get control

To halt the march of dawn

And the dawning of a feeling

That my day would also come

And yet, that wasn't the lesson

That I'd learnt that painful day

About how no meaning or sentiment

Can make death sway

Or make life stay

That's just not the way it works

Even if to god you pray

Or if you read those holy books

You're never too young to see death

You're never too young to die

For life is just a happening

That happens for a while

So, do you lay your cards on the table

And give it all you've got

I still have not decided

Carefree, is something I am not

Or was not taught

Too busy hanging on

But I was not the one who fought

Hard battles to gain ground

Instead I built a cross on a hill

To which I'm nailed and bound

With the nails and ties of fears

Speared in the side with loss

This is life in permafrost

You're never too young to see death

You're never too young to die

For life is just a happening

That happens for a while

The brave-hearted warriors say

That death comes to us all

And i wish I'd learnt the lesson

To live my life with balls

To live it with bells on

To sing loud my songs

To bleed out these poems

To stay up till the dawn

To know I'd sucked life dry

And gnawed it to the bone

So that if tomorrow brings my end

I'll be happy to let it come

So here's a toast to living free

To nurturing my own ebb and flow

To giving less of a fuck about shit

For this is what I know

That you're never too young to see death

You're never too young to die

For life is just a happening

That happens for a while