They took you from the hospital
They didn’t know why you had died
They wanted to do an autopsy

It took 3 weeks
We couldn’t see your body
It wasn’t fit they said
And eventually we got

A Report
Brain - 2 and a half pounds
Body - healthy, unmarked - not emaciated
No needle marks on the arms
Liver - taken for analysis
Traces of Tuinal and Physeptone
They cut, weighed and analysed you
But couldn’t find the reason
Why you had died
Drowning on your own *****
In a mental hospital

My mother took you to her hometown for burial
To the cemetery hedge where you were conceived
Later she told me that whenever you cried
She shoved a dummy covered in malt into your mouth
And then she would leave you
Her bundle of idle words, looks and *****

Poor Dorothy looking for escape
The war child who knew no softness or comfort
Poor John a quick coupling in the dark beneath the cemetery hedge
Begotten from chocolate, stockings and a Burslem teapot

once upon a time
i woke up in a garden of dried *****
from a tuinal OD
an uh oh moment
and if i hadn’t woken up
well no one held a gun to my head in union square
(an actual possibility in those days)
now at work in the hospital this morning
we just gave up on a 20-year-old athlete
OD’d on pills, arrested, dead before 8 a.m.
mom, dad and older brother are wild with grief
uh oh