Echo, song and smoking wax make up the church entire,
as he gives himself to silent hands that take him
trusting to the bread and wine...
He turns over in his bed intrigued
at how his dying mind in its own way
gives him what his spirit needs.

He has a songbird in a cage,
blinded to improve her song,
who like the soul imprisoned in his skin,
made herself forget the skies
and the flowered forests of her home,
though underneath the sweetness of her song,
he hears her pine for some long lost love.

He likes to try to guess the world of sight:
the soil opening wide its many mouths
to receive the swaddled dead,
or the way the wings of his guardian angel
surely fill this room, as she sits beside his bed
watching him with eyes of stars.

In the end no angel came for him,
but a faun gripped him like a lover
and drew him out as joy leaping
self-forgotten through fields that blazed
like windows in the church of summer,
till he whirled to one who cried his name
and flew like a bird through his heart of flowers.

The dead
are making babies still
fucking in porno clips
on the web. That’s my mummy
opening her legs
for that hairy
man. Was I conceived just then, is that bearded
bloke my da, who hugs her
close and gentle in the year
that she was beaten for
an hour, and died in the back room
of her local pub?

I watch her
do it all again — I’m sure
she likes him, her smile’s so real, so’s
the way she comes. Does
she sense we’re all around, unseen
and watching
over her, and maybe even guess
I’m out here too, staring
at the pearly gates
that I came through?

Before
I’m older than her twenty nine
I want to do a film of Jimmy
fucking me, and leave
it near her in the web’s forever now. You’ll find us
listed under hairy milfs, perhaps
with offspring still to come, all fruit
upon an endless vine.

But I’m glad
I can download my mum, know
the fierce embraces
that she gives, proud to have her here
in my own room, the way
she once welcomed me
into her salty womb, and kept me safe, a mad life
bouncing in its padded cell, while her red
heart roared up above, then broke
like a wave of the sea.