The Last Text Message

The ’Final Words’, a ’Dying Declaration’, the ’Suicide Note’, perhaps the ’Last Will and Testament’ have always a chance for any of us - although hopefully a long time from now - to have the final words on whatever the matter is that really matters and in some ways speak from beyond the grave. In fact, they could even be carved on a stone over a grave. How final is that?

I was thinking about this the other day as I was clearing some drawers and came across an old mobile phone from the 1990s, and remembered that when SMS / text messages arrived, how revolutionary and nice it was not to have to talk to work colleagues, you could instead just send them a message and err, they would never know that you were still in bed.

(Just me?)

Anyway, I also remembered (looked-up) that initially such messages were limited to a grand 160 characters, including spaces, and this gave rise to the death of punctuation and the English language as we knew it.

Probably.

But this anthology and the poems it contains aren’t meant to be morbid or a complaint, instead the prompt was to think of a final, short message that could be conveyed in the form of a poem that didn’t exceed 160 characters

Needless to say, there were some great responses, and we selected the finest of them for this wee anthology, with words from:

1. Gerald Killingworth
2. Amanda Hill
3. Julie De Brito
4. Liz Kendall
5. Nigel Kent
6. Roger Waldron
7. Wendy Goulstone
8. Christopher House
9. Philippa Ramsden
10. Julie Leoni
11. Miriam Moore
12. Patricia M Osborne
13. Phil Santus
14. Neil Windsor