When a Beauty outlives her looks.
The TV tolls her death at 79.
Jogs our memory about her brace of Oscars,
emphasises the ‘Dame’ but footnotes the genius of her face,
and the barmaid’s dirty laugh as she guzzled gin
and gorged on gateau in the 21 club.
Front page of The Sun and The Times
when ‘Liz marries again’; divorced, divorced, died,
tears in her violet eyes stealing no 4 from a homely friend.
Next, meeting her match with a cartoon ‘Wham!’,
the two of them writing the celebrity handbook as they jetted in
from Mustique in his and hers furs,
behind sunglasses like blackened out limo windows,
to a waiting blitz Krieg of flashing cameras.
The Savoy penthouse appropriated indefinitely,
but despite their insatiable appetite for each other,
staff ducking as furniture was hurled like thunder bolts,
nevertheless eternally coupled by that preposterous diamond.
Now recent footage stamps on the public retina
an old lady who did not do a ‘Marilyn’,
her pneumatic body shrunken like a party balloon,
at odds with the face that had become a gaudy copy
of its youthful glamour, painted on an over stretched canvas,
topped off by a dyed Warhol wig,
conveyed not in golden litter, but a wheelchair.
* Fiona Sinclair has had work published in numerous reputable magazines. Her
first chapbook Dirty Laundry was published by Koo Press in
February 2010.