Do you remember your first steps on English soil after the Wall fell and no one believed in communism anymore? Did you feel like a madman with your Whitman beard and tongue of prophecy that transformed words into bridges that led nowhere? Did you hear people laughing at you at the end of history when Nirvana screamed of age? Do you remember when Trotsky with his prostitute suits guided your ideals through office corridors, passed the soulless pragmatists to your desk that leaked meaning as the hours built up their excuses?

Father, enough of politics, Trotsky died with an ice pick to the brain and the world is melting under a sky of acid. Politicians are just managers now. It matters father I know; each breath is political, but these are big people on a little stage – speak to me now as your son, not a comrade after drunk meetings of nostalgia and emptiness. Tell me something human, of some small – no, miniscule – thing that would deaden historian’s erections. Give me images as exact as William Carlos Williams and his plums in iceboxes but with Neruda’s subterranean voice, beating in the deep heart of geography. But I know that you won’t tell, even mother gave up asking and she well – a woman is a vessel of burdens and a man comes only once.  She has lived alone with you for thirty-two years and you know nothing of her roses, her underwater volcanoes or the ashes she served you on Ikea plates before watching her crime shows and thinking nothing of dreams. She only has our dog (bought after my breakdown, when I tried to cut out the man in me), and the rapeseed fields, fruitless now in her abstract loneliness – her late autumn years passing – remorseless, without your reflection.

Do you remember father the dry crunch of childhood years? The time you first masturbated and thought you knew god and walked barefooted through your mother’s garden knowing instinctively that the nightingale’s song was your own? Do you remember when you entered god’s house and heard his voice in your silent skull and you knew hell was real and that hope lived in a hand you could never touch? Did you worry that every good, ill or perverted thought was broadcast in heaven’s eye? Did you make deals with the dead to protect your soul in case you sold it to the devil? An accident of words that led to your damnation. Did you feel in the cold glow of the night-light – that you knew the devil as well as god? Did your parents know the damage this would cause? Why even now with your books of atheism built around you like a nest, do you read scriptures – those iron words carved with god’s tears and wrath? Why you still look for him behind the mirror when all your friends know he’s dead and so do you, when you have the energy to think.

Father remember – remember when I was a child and we played wolves and howled at mother and pretended to piss on each doorframe, or when drunk after some political meeting that led nowhere you wrote notes on toilet paper and passed them under the door to me. Do you remember what they said?  I don’t, I lost them in my teenage years (those daily massacres of toothpaste and spots and, oh god why did you make me with this face and these nipples as big as clementines), but I never felt as close to you as I did then through a closed door, passing messages like spies.

Eternity creaks on its rusty hinges and stars are only dead light. Lines under your eyes mark every decade and your veins are rivers overflowing their fleshy banks. Why is there an emptiness that nothing fills? You gave me my blood and my thinning hair, my needless libido and my mental illness (undiagnosed just like yours). So you should know. Stop blubbering father. It is just an end. We made death after all. (Yeats said it so you know it must be true). 

Old man, the moss of time is covering my crevices and crawling up my tonsils – it’s the itch I can’t scratch. But my teenage tears mean nothing to the sky that swallows all blemishes to become blue. I hope I remember all or nothing of you – each is complete – each screams Genesis and I already worship you as a little god who knew nothing but created all the same. Drama does no one no good father, I only wanted to see you as you did, before you’re tied irrevocably to time and not me. Stop dribbling. Keep some dignity at least. 

Answer me father or I will flood silence with needless questions. Fine. Do you remember why doves become fires in children’s eyes? Why the English summer knows only defeat? Why I drowned my blooming youth in the bath, after I couldn’t stop thinking about thinking and you saved me? Talk to me. Talk to me as a man who knows each day is a battle with the sun that can never be won – that each siren is testament to man’s failure. Talk to me as a man, who knows a sleeping cat contains all of poetry, that the sparrow can become a symbol for all suffering – that the green tongue of spring brings only rain and that a woman is a cage of glances, (as we fucked them and thought only of our summers), and that love is not entombed in flesh, but in the universal body that contains every face. Oh god, father, sermons do no one no good and I won’t go all Emerson on you again. The nurses will make your bed soon– don’t worry. But even now I can’t stop father, even in this country that did nothing but make me want to be famous.

Do you remember your youth punctured like a football in the housing estates that never suited their names? Oh father I will leave when my lungs are windless plastic bags, when there is no oxygen for thought and the crimes of the everyday – the mundane, unreported crimes that the news gives no transcendence, have been brought up to Olympus.

Look at her father – and see her now with her dyed hair and false nails – tell her love was too much for you and it’s not her fault, that the morning never once surprised you and the worm spelt only grief. Father, you have been a fool. Trotsky is dead and you never held hot lilacs to your chest, or fucked your wife with the desire that formed the stars. You never once looked up to see the heart of every human reflected, only separation and hollow space – only endless meetings and wire cages you built to trap birds as a boy. Do you know that even onions sprout flowers? Or that on my tenth birthday sitting on the toilet I knew I could kill a man if I wanted, if I rolled the right number, if I played the right hand? But you don’t. How could you?

Don’t let this be an ending – with both of us silent as humiliated boys – no, as lifeless as a dead child’s old room kept exact, never altering. Let us remove our hats (as day replaces night) and with whisky or brandy– something smelling of the dirt of grief (of manly failure) and talk of history of ours of yours of mine, and speak secret things that would make our daughters blush and our mothers weep; let us know one another as men know the river, like men who know death like a parent. Let us speak of our sunken wonders and flick the crust from each wound and speak, speak father for death we both know is the end of life – but prisons are manmade and our life means nothing to god but everything to me, with my hands as broken as a woman’s.