Life is sweet

They call me “mellified” man, which you may consider rich,

that being a word not found in many dictionaries.

So here is a riddle to remember me by, a modern twist on one you may already

know:

“Out of the eater came something to eat; out of the weak came something sweet.”

The answer is me — or it soon will be as, with pollen-laden breath,

I crouch over the honey-pot, a swarm of bees seething in my ancient ear;

spooning out my meals like an infant with my throat burning from the sweetness.

Whose idea was it, I wonder, to offer himself up so selflessly?

Someone none too popular at school, I bet;

too eager to ingratiate himself with the other children,

that fat boy, begging to be rolled in the mud.

This, I tell myself, is what becomes

of the old and weak when they have no other purpose

than to sacrifice their own lives to save the lives of the sick.

Soon it will be my eightieth birthday and if I am not already at death’s door

I am at least shuffling slowly up the garden path towards it.

I have heard that irony is sweet, but it tastes like bitter aloes compared

with what is to be done to my twisted, brittle bones.

As beeswax coats my remaining teeth, they prepare my tomb for the next stage of

this digestive process;

I am on a diet, and what it lacks in variety, it makes up for in strictness:

I am eating only honey for a month. Soon I will begin to excrete it.

The produce of bees will be my urine

and my faeces will crystallise like molasses.

When I die I will macerate not in a hive

but in a stone coffin, steeped in honey.

Just how did one hundred years become the preparation time for this recipe?

Was it by trial and error or by some patient epicurean’s design?

Because it will be the 13th Century, when my skeleton is honeycombed

and my blood syrupy as mead,

before mummified morsels of my body are swallowed like a human confection

by the living to medicate their ailing limbs.

And so it is that, while my life is sweet,

death will be sweeter still.

—0O0—