Donnie #2

We brought him pencils and paper and books

placed them with reverence inside his old briefcase

(the one mum said smelt like the city)

delivered them to him in the hope of prompting

watched those bony, once-dexterous fingers

feel through the contents like a learning child

take a texta

and draw a terrifying picture

of the Queen Mother

with a moustache

Donnie

We referred to our memory of you like an abstract
dictionary
a vapourous tome floating in the backs of our
brains

text mixed with pictures

we flicked through the fixtures of your former
voice
your former
face
your former
thoughts
and ways of expressing
them

this was our way of guessing what you
wanted

this was our way of preparing for your
death

Reception

you

made

a

myth

out

of

me

I move through

cloaked in the long blue cloak my
mumma gave me last
November
and now those Summer embers have come to choke on
Autumn
I am automatically open to being
closed.

My Niece Sleeps

my niece sleeps
tangled in hair and
dreams
imp spirit bottled in a
cream baby
cheeks flushed with
heat
sweet sweat-matted head paused mid-
motion
she seems moored mid some strange
ocean
she seems suspended in some kind of there-less
air
some kind of somewhere
nowhere

Gareth

Pulled into the dark smoke of his voice, his
stories, the pinched flicker of his beautiful
battered cheek, sometimes the voice drags,
sometimes it clanks, sometimes it's hard to hear
it speak, sometimes it swims so smoothly to the
surface of the room, gliding, angelic, through
the ears and the heads up to the roof where it
swoops, circles, hovers like breath, then descends
so slowly, softly, deathly still, a smokey trill
in a burning bush, then the air clears, the wood
creaks, and you are felled with one big push.

Untitled #20

he plays me

ukelele

after the sun

has passed