ghost-woof
 
we tried to bury you
that day in March
with a fistful of dirt,
stretch of lime over your body.
 
joe shut your eyes
with two soft fingers,
wrapped you  in a blanket, 
that covered
the velvet of your ears,
 
 that used to prick up,
so sweetly, when you heard
cars or postmen or the sound
of keys in the lock,
when I came home.
 
you’d claw
the lace curtains, gleefully
serenade the school children
 
howl in glory
if a particularly large package
was dropped through.
 
sometimes, now,
I hear that sound, a yelp
from a passing car, or just
the quiet sound at the back
of a dream- softer
 
than you ever were in life
a bark breezing round
my ears, traffic and sirens
swelling to a halt.
 
at the back of my throat
I hear your
little tip tap on the stairs

think of you
 nuzzling my toes, licking
crumbs off the floor.

hope that somewhere,
you are chasing rabbits
and eating goose liver pate.

Mní wičhóni/uisge-beatha

The gold water poured into thin flutes;
soft lips poring over the tasting notes:
Ashy,
oily.
bitter.
 
The drink speaks of rivers.
 
The burning drink that I have swirled,
the septic wounds that it has healed,
the lifelong visions that I have seen
as the fire ferried down my paradise-throat.
 
Don’t let them hurt my sister, it says,
she is my right arm, and though she is mighty
the great snake infects with stony-syrup
and if it bites her
she will choke
and her people's land will go up in smoke.
Water is life
says the water of life.
 
Don’t let the snake seep its milk into their fighting river.
Let them drink it clean.

when it's gone, it's all gone and I lie with you under the sun staring out on the ruins of a brand new empire and we talk about where it came from, where it went. you can feel as the rush of wind on the underground the clock ticking around to the hour papercut days suck it from your body. you can feel as laserbeam eyes contact and it all comes flooding back, a damburst, a beautiful catastrophe. You feel the wrench when it leaves you, and the wrench when it returns salts the earth so nothing can ever take its place seeps in behind your eyes and changes the worldcolour it creates its own gravity, accretes tiny turns of phrase burns affection, the blue of the sky, and summer's haze. thoughts into mantras into unalienable truths written in fifty-foot high letters of fire so tall so bright until you can't believe no one else sees what you do. you will feel it rush, the afterlife, the afterlight, it takes hold and it is dread and awe and sorrow and it speaks a language no-one knows and it rises, it rises, it rises, it rises when it's gone, it's all gone and you won't miss it and you won't know what you're missing.