Here's how they rated him when the looked back: sometimes he did this, sometimes he did that. - Simon Armitage

Lifetimes went past. With the critical mass
of hardly more than the thought of a thought
I kept on, headlong, to vanishing point.
I looked for an end, for some dimension
to hold hard and resist. But I still exist.

Ignite the flares, connect the phones, wind all the clocks;
the sun goes rusty like a medal in its box -
collect it from the loft. Peg out the stars,
replace the bulbs of Jupiter and Mars.
A man like that takes something with him when he dies,
but he has wept the coins that rested on his eyes,
eased out the stopper from the mouthpiece of the cave,
exhumed his own white body from the grave.

In a life, most of us turn no more than 45 degrees. Not much
compared to those who turn full-circle in the slighest breeze
or those who totally uncoil, but enough in the end
to tell a bag of diamonds from a sack of coal.