DNR             

The Poet was engaged in an end-of-days thought experiment. Looking down from the ceiling at his comatose body with its DNR label, he considered its eventual disposal. Given the four elements, symbolically speaking, it would be a choice between Worm, Vulture, Dragon and Shark.  I will be a poet until the last breath in my body, he had once proclaimed at a literary festival. Anyway, he had not made a living will, so the choice was academic. Obviously.

He had included dragon because it added the mythological to the mundane. He could be interred in the soil, exposed to the air, sunk at sea and three of the aforementioned scavengers would congregate for the feast. But for a poet the dominant element was fire! And only dragons consume flesh with fire. 

Abruptly his fanciful meditation on mortality was interrupted. There was a change of signal from the life support machine below him. It had assumed a single, steady note.

He was looking down at his corpse. 

A week later, at the crematorium nearest his isolated writer’s retreat, he viewed from above a gathering of publishers, critics, poets and fans. For those present, the coffin slid mechanically away through utilitarian heat-proof curtains and into the furnace. The end does no justice to the poetic imagination, many thought.

But for the Poet the coda was majestic. A great crimson flying beast of scales and forked tail and scorching breath swooped down. It was incarnated from the combined imaginations of all poets through time, from Beowolf to Blake to the present day and from all those who would follow. 

The dragon, in a whirling wind, snatched him from the air above the mourners and carried him away on a last great voyage to rejoin the eternal flame.