Nobody makes a grand exit in Michael John Pickering's poem, least of all its speaker. The first stanza is one unfinished sentence that slips out through a side door, not the front, where people might see. Its verbs are all retreat: "Going out", "backing away", "clutching". There is no "I" to perform them. The speaker is half-erased by the grammar before the poem asks us to imagine his funeral.
What he carries away is the poem's richest image: "a soft fruit / rotten before it ripened". The "missed kiss" is the likeliest cause of the embarrassment, though the poem leaves open whether it was a kiss that landed badly or one that never happened. The fruit widens the meaning beyond a single fumbled moment. It suggests a life, or a capacity for love, that spoiled without ever reaching its best. Even the word order carries the point. "Rotten" arrives first, and the ripeness it should have followed comes too late, with the two r-sounds nudging against each other like a bruise.
The second and third stanzas shift to question and answer, as if the speaker were running through the order of service for his own funeral and checking each item off. Every answer deflates the question. A hearse is dignified and slow, and what he gets is "an airport trolley": wheeled, yes, but cheap, impersonal and built for luggage. The body becomes baggage in transit. The mourners come next, and here the grammar changes. "are lost umbrellas" is the only answer with its own verb, as though the speaker cannot bring himself to say "nobody came" and lets the image say it for him. Umbrellas belong to rainy funerals, but these are the ones left behind and never reclaimed. The mourners are as unclaimed as he feels.
In the last stanza the lines gain capital letters, and the jokes turn darker. A requiem is a prayer for rest, so "a spiritual trauma" is almost its exact opposite. It borrows the vocabulary of religion and sours it into something wounding rather than consoling. Then comes the final blow. An obituary is a life gathered into words, but this one is "an embarrassed cough": a noise, not a word, and the sound people make when they have nothing to say. The cough also closes a circle. The poem began in social embarrassment with the missed kiss, and it ends in embarrassment, so awkwardness frames the whole thing.
Notice the direction of travel through those two stanzas. The answers begin with solid objects (trolley, umbrellas), move to an abstraction (trauma), and finish on a sound that vanishes as soon as it is made. The speaker fades out stage by stage, and the poem ends the way he predicts he will, quietly and without being heard.
The form supports this. The poem is in free verse, with no end rhyme and short, clipped lines of a few beats each. It moves quickly and almost offhandedly, like someone who doesn't want to make a fuss. The lack of rhyme matters too. A rhyming couplet would give the satisfying click of closure, and the poem withholds it. The title, "The Very End", promises a finale, and what the poem delivers is bathos, a comic drop from the expected grandeur to something small and ordinary.
That is where its significance lies. The poem is funny, but the humour is a way of getting close to something painful. By mocking his own funeral, the speaker avoids self-pity and still admits his fear. What he dreads is less death itself than being unnoticed, a life that never ripened and an ending that nobody remarks on. Anyone who has left a party early with burning ears will recognise the feeling, and the poem packs it into twelve short lines and a cough.