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There is a heaven in the tears of fruitful sins. Sunken dreams, so full of a living death, wash against my irises. The haloed trumpets sing of the mysteries of centuries, dripping sticky with the heavy glue of measurable time — time nibbles on ash dipped eyelashes as well as baby’s toes — if I could just have your love I’d be alright, but minutes feast upon the hours, masticating upon every good intention.

I had to bury my parents in the sky so many times in the last two years. They are both gone, gone as a soul can be and still be entombed In the raw flesh, marinated by each year. I try not to think, to dwell upon the cross of sorrow, but thinking is all I have left to do. I picture myself as a piece of fruit, just hung there unaware of environmental or mental influence. Fucking moron. I hold my mum’s hand whose brain has been bludgeoned by a virus so quick that grief can never bloom from famine’s throat.

Dripping evening sliding lonely. Let’s eat French fries and listen to Debussy pussy! I shouldn’t talk to myself like this.

Shrapnel eyelids close on the dawn’s first breaths of loneliness. I wove my skin out of the fabric of mourning as I opened my mouth to birth the first bird of Spring with the water of your song. In this countryside that refuses to recognise the dominion of language, I let the fluorescence of the city’s stars leak from my eyes before falling on this rich loam; absorbing their impurities like cigarette filters. On these paths my childhood ended. A war sabres through the iris of reality. But even here, in a village far beyond the gun-shots and screams. It taints everything with its memory.

David Hay

Twitter: @arched_roadway

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