the boy, again, again

He punctured priory hearts with his tongue,
and digested their beliefs with a tenderness.
He shakes now, when he speaks,
and can't move for fear of falling.
Sparks have landed on his tongue and burnt his tastebuds.
The charms of summer have gone.


Always behind him, always reflected in the Pernod,
the Catholic boy lingers. When he kisses rough girls on the cheek,
the boy laughs and raps his knuckles,
telling him to behave.
When he moves inside some downtrodden urchin,
the boy sits perfectly still and saintly,
ash falling from his eyes.
There's something beautiful to be found in the way
the urchin boy weeps, as the Catholic boy watches them.

Tonguetied and tangled, they used to fall beneath the sheets
of brilliance and lust and brightness,
but there's a disease that has soaked up through the linen,
that has punctured one too many priory hearts.

He struggles against it in the night,
when he can't control what sleep spiders crawl inside his head.
He sees the Catholic boy again and again,
laughing and smiling and coaxing,
and the knowledge that the boy is gone is too much.


Sometimes he stands in the toilet cubicles,
and can't speak until the sharpened point
has squeezed poison into his blood stream.
Sometimes, even then, he can't talk.

But he can dream, he can dream and think and remember.
The memories that litter the pavement
like drunken, middle aged men,
are, he thinks,
better than anything in this fucking bitch of a world.