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Bob Dylan

THE CYBER DEAD

‘Knock-knock-knockin’ on Heaven’s door,’ a busker

began to sing near to the ice cream kiosk,

just after I had left the public toilet,

its adamantine urinals made

in Burnley. I walked beneath the lime trees,

along the embankment. The brown river

swirled in spate, high with rains from the remnants

of Atlantic storms breaking on shorn

and distant mountains. I thought of those dead friends –

their social media accounts intestate –

forever alive, and orbiting

eternally in cyber space, so close

yet still and always forlornly ‘Knock-knock-

knockin’ on Heaven’s door’.