In the charity shop I try on a coat
flocked with fake shearling,
shaved-soft almost: fibres
fired onto plastic to fool the wrist.

You’re a character, a Roman numeral,
an internet meme. Descendant
from a peasant’s crook or cattle prod,
you’re the twelfth letter of the alphabet,

Being quiet and easily tired by being alive among people, I take
the cowardly route to community. I curate a digital garden of oddity.

At best my phone is a menagerie of queers: trinket makers, amateur
playwrights, witches, and, over and over again, my own personal monarchy.

Maybe after your bath—
you will sit for a moment,
the towel will hold you close
like a quiet prayer—

where I saw you praying through the angle of the door
Now hangs only in my mind I breathe on its glass wipe away fly specks

Sing silver times, shimmering columns
of light on the wine-dark, temple
to moon-eyed Hecate, the insatiable.

We rolled out on Seven Sisters Road,
two crates of Tyskie empty in my stairwell.

We were talking from the chest, walking backwards
crackling air above our heads like streetlights

But look here, I turned my head
and discovered the Denver Museum
waiting,
nerve, a soft-boned
species hums

He’s a house of cards, a delicately balanced pyramid
held together by hearing aids and dusty bifocals and
wobbling dentures and ageing pacemaker and
shirt with three buttons missing in action and