Do you ever think about the boy who loved you with his whole heart?
Do you ever think about the boy who let you turn him into a monster?
Do you ever think about the time when you yelled at me for getting my hair cut?
It was over skype, while you were on vacation with your family
I wore a hat for three days to try and hide it from you because I knew you'd be mad.
Do you ever think about the time you told me I was selfish in bed?
Do you ever think about the time you told me I made you feel like **** because you were a grade above me but we were taking the same biology class?
Because I quit taking science classes that year
And recently I took one again for the first time since we broke up and I realized that I'm good at it and I like it, but there's no time for me to catch up enough to study it in college.
Do you ever think about all the times I tried to get my emotions out on paper and how you either laughed at the improbability or told me it was disgusting?
Do you ever think about how you told me to stay in the closet so that your parents wouldn't be upset?
Do you ever think about the night when you called me a monster and screamed on the floor of my bedroom, beneath my desk?
Do you remember how I held you for hours on the floor, even as you clawed at my arms and legs?
Do you ever think about how you taught me that love was giving up everything, becoming some guy I never was, to make somebody else happy?
Do you ever think about how that could have ****** me up?
Do you ever think about how we had *** every time we were alone together but you never once kissed me?
Do you ever think about how you couldn't tell me you loved me unless you called me Chauncey?
Do you ever think about what you did to me?
Because I do.
Oh my God, I do.

I wake in this city
This city that didn't bear me
This city that didn't raise me
And yet it's this city that i seek to find something of me
Not in the pubs or the clubs or the karaoke bars
Where revelers conspire to dream and drink to the stars
Nor the cafes where poets and artists in a foreign language create.
Pass the market stalls where secondhand books and vinyls are stacked like freight
It is to the quietened streets of the old town I go
Where i long for the walls to speak once more
To reveal their hidden histories
To help fashion some sense of a man
One unknownst to me, my fathers father whose name I share
A fine skilled seamster, thus a tailor by trade
Not arriving to this city for work on fabrics of nylon and silk
But to stitch and sew the flesh of limbs in a paramedic corps
Another pawn of the Great War under King George's command
Driven only by economic necessity from a penal homeland
Not of conscription, politics or some moral conviction at play
For the price of neutrality is one that poverty simply refuses to pay
Returning home to an Ireland of hostility or silence at best
Medals now lying deep in pockets not proudly pinned to chests
Irish heroes don't fight in a British war for a King's crown
No such stories from father to son shall ever pass down
And now, a grainy photograph, three medals for a sons son to take
A dog tag that bears my name, a number and RC to depict a faith
From a man exiled in his home as a forgotten prisoner of war
To honour a legacy i find myself in this city afar
Asking the same questions of him as to me
Is this city the last place he truly felt free?

Each head accounted for
and every paycheck cashed,
we hunched near a campfire.
My father struck a match
and touched the tip of a Lucky Strike.
The horses whinnied softly
and stomped their hooves,
the cattle bawled in the corral.
My father leaned closer to the fire
took one long dirt-flavored drag
drew another square from the pack
and wished one day he could watch it all burn.

there's times where
I feel fifteen again
when I feel her wet kiss
and that energy of her turned on
the thoughts go wild in my mind
return I do to
1969 under the
stands at the football game
it is all the same
I am energized a young'en again
wild with passion
drunken lust
just a little more
attentive to her
eyes and elbows
her softest pleasures
her thighs her sighs
her kiss and breath
the passion
though as new as at fifteen
in the wet clover
behind the football stadium,
I don't have to close my eyes,
to imagine.