straight now, your John’s a man of his word

your ex-girlfriend’s on hormones

goes by Shaun, binds their breasts; wasn’t a stretch
the bipolar came out of the blue at 32

heroin had bound like glue, swaddled shared shame

but, what’s in a name?
(at 18 Tony was an Auckland punk

died Joanne in a Brixton haircutters chair at 28 in ‘88. AIDS)

 

swimming outside flags, the blood tide nearly drowned us too

the pullback rush, the relentless undertow.

we’re Facebook friends now. we post elegies, share

photos of our lost on birthdays and death days
(bikers on K Road gang-raped Dean, 17, for looking like a girl

suicide at 39 finally freed him from the rapists’ rack)

 

in the thick of it, with the blinding bind of lovers and haters

pricking us like voodoo dolls, our lived experience lacked narrative

was pandemonium in a dungeon of distorted mirrors

making off, making out with the zeitgeist
(Zed, a gordian knot of pain and desire, sped east at 21

AIDS sucked the flesh off his sassy bones, ash at 45

his sisters insist it was cancer & cherish his quirky ways)

 

remember? we magicked up poems and pipe dreams to wrap

around our isolation like warm black cloaks.
Johnno, Shaun, you and me – we are old now

stitching new rainbow quilts from rescued remnants

train wrecks with track marks, glad of the luck

that pins us to the present, while pining for friends passed