I wonder if the world will carry these little memories
past the point where we shall cease to be.

(1.)

like the bite of your father’s rosebush
weeping pinks down the palisade
bittersweetly
his girly flytrap weed he always called it
or ‘Miriam’
after your mother passed one February bleak
whispering a prayer to repay the earth
from which she’d sprouted into beauty
with bloodlet fingertips,
welling eyes and a head held high
”you won’t be rid of me that easily.”

(2.)

the graveyard of rainbows incomplete
which you mistook for a dream
framed so perfectly
by the window of the airplane
that shot us back to New Orleans.

(3.)

the clementine sunrise
stumbling down the canopy
painting morning dew into diamonds
worn by the spiderwebs between
those static storm clouds
slowly pried unstuck
by summer breeze

(4.)

how those crimson bugs
so small but twice so clever
spelled mayday in morse code
crawling round Sam’s dancing hands
with no intention of abandoning ship
leaving that vessel of wreathed flesh
that her doctors had named Huntington’s chorea
christened not with champagne
but earthquakes
and then set adrift
into the vacuum of dysphoria
to tremble forever
just another ghost
in god’s phantasmagoria.

(5.)

what a thumbnail moon
after lion’s mane rainfall
would smell like to me

(talcum powder, a field of irises, rebirth and nicotine.)

(6.)

and how death
that abhorrent monster lean
revealed itself to be
just a ballet of roots
returning to the seed.