Cover Her In a Shroud Of Headlines
"[Jade Goody is] dying as she lived... in that all she knows is a life in front of the camera and all she can do to ensure the future for her children is to make as much money as quickly as possible for them in the only way she knows how; on television and in the press." Mark Borkowski
Bathe her in a halo of klieg lights,
in a stuttering semaphore of camera flash.
Strip her back to the beginnings of flesh
in the television’s maw.
Cover her in a shroud of headlines.
Swarm through her like termites.
She is hollow but willing. The future spites
and sears her. Raw
as hope's absence, she fights
–with grit and wishes–her decline.
She is begging for a light to shine
on her body’s civil war,
dressed to the nines
and ready for her death, a gash
of truth amongst the trash.
This, at last, is her time to soar.
At the point I wrote this, I had not been writing satirical poems regularly for the Borkowski website for a couple of years, and the weekly churn of satirical poem-writing cynicism had turned into a quiet, seething horror of the celebrity scrum and a particular sympathy for Jade Goody, whose decline this poem marks. She died a month later.
