Pictures of your tubes and a wooden cross
Engraved is all I know of you.
I wasn't yet a thought when perhaps you wrapped a
Tiny hand 'round a trembling finger to feel a beat,
Or when maybe you cried just enough for everyone
Who kissed your little head.
I sidestepped all of your goings on and the grief
By a few years, but I will always miss you.

I will miss our bond.
You didn't stay long enough to grow into your mannerisms,
But I wonder what we could have shared.
Would you have been funny or serious?
Together or scattered?
Happy?

Somehow you've always been there for me.
You listened when I didn't know anyone else
Would and your flowers became my sanctuary.
Maybe you would kick my *** for
Being so uselessly sentimental,
And maybe you wouldn't.

It gets cold here, but you know that;
I hope you rest easy in your little garden,
Fit for a princess.

.
"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter"
John Keats, Ode On A Grecian Urn.

.
I'm never sure how I should take his silence,
It's not by choice, that much I know.
For he is a piper painted on porcelain,
Left to inspire a dreamer in an Ode.

His immortal canopy never sheds a leaf,
But offers no shade - frozen in time -
And as it was written, he never came to life and played
His fair maiden her melodious rhyme.

It sits on his lips as they chip and crack;
A dry mouth, a pipe for melodies made.
Sadly for the piper, I don't share Keats' hope
As he said of his maiden, 'She cannot fade'.

This brave boy's riff will remain dormant,
Haunting and quiet - laid on porcelain,
As I can't help this overwhelming jealousy
Of the notes he'll never play trapped within.

How they reel through my mind but leave nothing -
Not a sound or a ripple of waves,
Whereas mine float a while and decay with little grace,
The dotted-quavers left fading on staves.

I'm never sure how I should take his silence,
It's not by choice, that much I know.
Yet I envy more than words his lifetime in a moment,
In a world in which I wait and watch things grow.

Anaemic black mist creeps its way between toes,
crawling eyewards, worming stealthily up shins,
pausing only to cup bolted knees and find more
progress toward the stomach's pit where it will rest,
For now.

The soaking - from outside in - is a violation as a pore
stretched aside is all the space this ten tonne mass
needs - a callused finger pulling back a fleshy curtain
to claim squatter's rights - mashing its body into a crawl space,
It curls.

Right here, in the depths, it will feed from its host and
gradually weave a tendril through intestines and bile
like a periscope, seeking and feeling for a route to the stem:
The source of everlasting sustenance;
The end goal.

Once it latches, it will live forever suckling stance.
The insipid parasite, the binding leech; as it takes hold,
consumes with its voidwalker embrace
and paints every memory with your fault;
Perpetual guilt.

The tide collects it all by morning;
The drama and the ***** napalmed across the path.
The scenes at second warning for most had been swept away
Before they wiped the sand from their shoes.

Empty cans of Dutch and Tuborg slouched on the dunes
Are tight-lipped about the Velvet Strand's secret ecosystem;
An underground microcosm;
A peripheral cluster of seething emotions drowned.

Memories of those years - although some expired,
The vestiges take pride of place - hold a cosmic clump of smells,
Tastes, firsts, goosebumps, hangovers, and ends.
I never before understood what I was holding on to.

Winters down in the shelters nearly killed us but we
Huddled through the cold, lit cheap firelogs and
Found our oblivion. It didn't take much for me to develop  
A stagger - tolerance for a lot of things was learned later.

I narrowly recall my first taste of poor judgement and
Hazy-headed stargazing. Six cans of Stonehouse
Dry cider - most of which ended up on the hillside -
Was a ridiculous endeavour that will always be sublime.

At the heart of it, I did it to impress a girl;
The one every boy has or has had that sticks;
Who holds your firsts and your hands and makes
Things simple if only for her complexity;

The one that never fails to bring upon digression when
Pens are involved. Revisiting reminiscence on a jarring note,
I think of my Junior Cert exams and a cross-dressed man
Exposing himself to two uniformed boys behind the public toilets.

This one doesn't stir the joy of the others.
This one I wish would dissolve;
An ugly, awkward blotch on a childhood.

Luckily fondness trumps disgust when recalling that place
Because of sunrises and sunsets absorbed from the roof.
The Summers spent jumping the gap and drowning in the
Heat of the sun were everything.

The fugitive sand between our toes and under finger nails
Became an accepted nuisance, a part of the territory;
A lingering grain or two to drag you back.
I miss waking up with the smell of last night's faded fire.