1.

Grief is the feeling you have

the process you pass through

like a tunnel but more

physiological / a response to losing

some thing / some one

you once loved.
So when they call to tell me you are dying

to describe the room in which they have laid you down

to tell me that my mother is there by your side

and my sister is on her way and all the four horsemen

of your personal apocalypse have gathered

at the window to wait and watch you as you go /

when they tell me that your breath is slowing / that your

heart – that stubborn muscle –

beats irregularly now, is falling still, is stopping

           now stopping

                      now stopped
Grief is not what I feel
2.

Three days later I wake

far from home in a dark town
We have lost two fathers now

Mine and yours in quick succession and

Although I have nothing to say

I get up and lay out words on paper

because I need them, because

they are the only things that make sense in this

insensible world.

I need them to hold me here

on this side of whatever wall there is between us and our dead

I write down my second father’s name

and the name of my first father

and my own name

and your name

I write down the first words I knew and then the last

each on a new sheet of paper / but there is

something wrong

each time I lift the pen the words are gone
I do not know the names of things

there are no words for this
I am

far from home in a dark town and the words – all words

all language – are draining from me like the blood

they drained from you after you died.
We are empty now

We are hollow
Soon, we might truly become

what we first were.
3.

He keeps coming back

old ticker, old fucker

his hands reach around my throat and

squeeze

I can feel the heat of his

burned skin

the stink of his breath

the grip he has on me
but then he is fading he is turning

to smoke or, no, it is more like the air

of the dark separates him from himself

As if the death outside of him

has collided with the death inside him
soon, they will meet on the surface of his

disrupted skin
I am alive, he says.

No, I tell him. you are dead.
We spend weeks, months, in this dance
We go around in circles.

It is as if I am

roadkill and he is waiting. He waits

the way a vulture waits

by the side of the road

waiting for a break in the traffic

to strike
4.

We don’t bury our fathers / any more

We don’t lay their bodies in the earth.
There are no memorials for the dead white men

who loved us / who hurt us

whose fists broke and then mended

our hearts / our bones.
We burn them like Vikings …

not really. There are no warships / flaming on open seas.
Only women in suits

who sit us down in air-conditioned rooms

serving tea and sandwiches

while your bodies are cleaned and plasticised

prepared for viewing
Days later, your body is delivered

into a furnace that burns without flames

And your ashes are vacuumed up

by a certified technician who seals you

into a baby-blue plastic box

in a white cardboard box
you are heavy, now,

your death has a material weight

you sit in the corner of the room
one more thing

to move around
5.

My family cannot agree on where to spread your ashes

and so you are divided

one last time

my mother’s portion

is weighed in the kitchen scales
A kilogram of your ashes for her

and another for each

of your children
It is a kind of joke / this last quibbling

over where to throw the soft grey

flakes – the divided portions that remain
I hear a rumour that my mother

poured a cup of you into the toilet

and shat on you one last time
I can’t take any of this seriously without getting

everything wrong
But how else are we to take ourselves, our lives,

given the seriousness of our plight?
6.

I wake in the night / choking again on

your hands drifting down the channel of my throat
I hear you laughing in the next room

telling stories in the last person.

I hear you telling the moon

that a story is not what’s necessary / not what’s needed

there is no way to make any sense of things, no need

for a story
only a life
7.

I wish we could message the dead

I would write to tell you all the things

I kept from you
I would make you listen

to my heart keening like a curlew
I would make you feel the tendons / crack
I would make you feel the throb of that mended

break in my arm and the dimple in my

skull from where you

slammed my head against the wall 
I would make you vomit up my other, first, father

give him back to me, goddamnit

give him back
he was not yours to eat / to love

to lose
8.

September. The season turns and you

are still not here
I take it back, old man

I take it all back

I take it hard, I take it harder than I can explain

We are here, far from home

in a dark town
there are no words
there is no grieving for the ones

we never loved

the ones who never loved us in return