Prick of Conscience

It’s when I’m not here again my foreign father
finally dies. The grief he leaves us is still being
drawn up by Italian bureaucracy including
the ‘Agency of the Come-In’. It calls for multiple
visits so here I am waiting in his apartment.
There are photos of his drawn body I’m keeping
up in the Cloud from my sight. I’m where he’s not
because we’re meant to be apart again. The air
in here is always touchingly the same making itself
a meantime or afterlife that will cling to clothes
as smoke of cigarettes. I shower to wash myself
ashore. The Pricke of Conscience –
meant to be reading it while here but am not.
Also Book VI of the Aeneid again. Not.
In the living room his antique portrait
of a cleric praying to a corner of its gilt frame.
...