It's hard to imagine any of our friends will die

My housemate will never come home
to find me unconscious at the bottom of the stairs
my head cracked against the radiator.
A surgeon will never gather my family into a room
and say ‘we did all we could.’
I will never have to see any of my friends wearing an oxygen mask
or being fed by a drip
surrounded by Get Well Soon cards and fresh fruit.
We’re just far too busy for drowning accidents

or chip pan fires
because it’s their turn to come to ours for Christmas
and our turn to go to theirs for New Year
and it’s Glastonbury in June
and Edinburgh in August
so there is no time for asthma attacks or carbon monoxide poisoning
motorway pile ups or complications during minor surgery
because we’re going to see Camera Obscura

at Battersea Arts Centre in November
and The Fall have got a new album out soon.
It's impossible to imagine blood in our stool
or that one of us will collapse
and a passing member of St John’s Ambulance will stoop down
and announce there’s no pulse
it’s hard to imagine getting a call late at night
saying Something Has Happened.
We won’t need their morphine or life support machines

because it’s hard to imagine any of us will be written out
like a character in our favourite programme
we'll switch on the TV and suddenly they're not there.
It's impossible to imagine that things will carry on without us
that one of us might die
and General Elections and Big Brother and the BBC website
and Derby County and animal rights activists will continue like nothing's changed
and people will keep meeting for coffee
and renewing library books
like we never existed at all.