Throwing up on the grave of Alfred Alderson
(and loving wife, Elizabeth, RIP)
I pause for contemplation –
Whilst watching a ball of spit between strings of saliva
swinging, precariously, beneath my lips.
Heavily heaving again, I feel the rich
harsh soup rise up, and I choke on the lumps.
My eyes drown in acidic seas;
I’m gasping for air, holding my stomach,
clasping my head.

Feeling the alcohol whisk inside of me,
I look back to where she’d derided me:
the terracotta bricks staring blankly over
the grey teeth of the graveyard mouth
that my yellowed vomit covers.

Are you buried together, man and wife?
I see your grey bones linked, leg over leg,
collapsed, so that I can’t tell whose is whose,
and in death you aren’t parted. Together.
(Bile is swimming at the back of my mouth)
Is this the only way to achieve it?
For finality, for fidelity, for more than fucking
- but no-one’s buried in this graveyard
anymore.