I agreed to preserve your double life

That requires

At family dinners

I check with you

Before responding

Homo-speak is a medical mystery

The fluent suffer insidious onset

suffer without suffering
Your grandma’s brain has

 dropped lobes

and

therefore volume
But her traditional views

 thus far

have not varied
Are not temporal
For a woman in her final days,

She makes tides of bile;
has a lot to spew

about sluts and DNA-errors
I have infinity in compliments

I pay on rotation

to her wedding glory
Remember when your mum’s

Purebred was diagnosed

Metastatic?
I sounded the alarm

Remember – I flagged those lymph studs

It was me who said

“Those nipples look real suspicious”
I took her to the VET

had that dog

 put-down

on behalf of you
There’s kibble

embalmed on my flannel

It’s criminal

It’s a crime against nature:

That you complain

about the smell

And the p r i c k l y

texture
It’s criminal

that you snuck your airpods in

when I read you that

ballad by Minnie Bruce Pratt

Did you hear a word of it

Did you hear a word of why

Minnie’s blastoma was entrusted to me?
Why I was awarded custody?
We have the same antigens
Dyke-breath is mutiny

Straight to the

magistrates

for sucking on her tumour

like a gobstopper

I made her poems last years
Still recovering

From the time I exhumed your

mother’s old wedding dress

So your big sister could

Suck-up to tradition

 on her wedding day
Every time you blink

your prescription contacts

behind your pokeballs,

I conflict-mediate

My sleeves drenched with saline,

It’s stings when I squirt the secret

Passcode

I know but sit

Sit still,

And you might

get a sticker

A pokemon? Bipedal?

Clefairy or Charmaleon?
Leave tips when you’re serviced

It’s humane

You leave tips for delinquents

Who don’t have ambulance cover

Haven’t been house-trained

Dykes who suck on their thumbs

And get-by on

death-bed poems
You retain the low-stakes

Of the closet

Have homeostasis undercover

Want the lie you’re living to last forever
I will not be mutated

by your anxiety

I’m just too self-sufficient

To be annihilated
And perhaps it’s time I took myself for a check up

Maybe that solvent in my mouth is the

the solution

Maybe the solution to my ails

is integrity