“Greenish yellow. All ghosts wear clothes of this colour.” Frida Kahlo
Sunrise over a Christmas market, somewhere,
tinsellitis in hollows of a church bell.
knells the beauty of the cancer coming.
Black-coal morning,
flames in the hearth are the same fire
which burns haunted houses down.
All one cemetery breath
wreathed in a Doctor’s hands,
cold slab of a tunnelled scan
directs morphine hearse to the grave.
Maybe you can pack a case with despair?
Placed love in a coffin
as a baby, blue, in an incubator,
still sail you ships around me
my harbour is always open to you love.
Requiescat in dream fall
dressed in nicotine ceiling
it is Christ who wears the yellow veil
wed first love to last rites
You dream of this: the man, the woman,
walking close to water
closer to the distance we bridged
Of one foot slipping, one hand reaching,
fingers gripping on to branches – but ripping –
and then the solace of certainty
You dream of this: and on each waking
you hear the hammer thunder in the flood
and see the axe head in the river’s green.
Old long since,
how will this bedroom smell
now the axe has bled
into the drowned green.
I listened to the noise
bark of angry little dogs,
she made her desires ocean clear
but still they painted lipstick on pigs
In the way breaths leave the hospice
their voices are as distant as the
shit upon pigsty walls,
she was once lost until she found Cymru
deluded are the gonts
