Breakfast

for Frank, Kate and Donna Marchesi you do not know what it is I am feeling and that is fair ​for it changes so freely I watch a man who is more like my dad than my own sit in a blue hospital chair his lungs have changed filled with fluid and his wife kisses his forehead and all the fear ​of feeling trapped in that house on tulip street comes flooding back, but tulips signify love and when I think of them as a flower not red brick and fence, I hear my grandad singing, I hear him sing if you were the only girl in the world ​and I see the magpies and charred bark of the bat eaten mango tree from his backyard ​I remember laying underneath ant bite stung back staring at decayed yellow globes and I don’t feel scared anymore ​I’ve watched death linger so many times now and I want you to know I do not think it’s beautiful. It’s the colour of beige walls and tastes like bad sachets of black coffee​it its shapes of fingernails and flaked skin and breathing tubes inserted in nostrils it’s the forgetfulness of my name but not my face and death doesn’t ever remember that your favourite meal of the day is breakfast​ I hear my grandad sing when I think of love and I watch the man who is more like a dad than my own sleep, his chest weighed down from invasive mass his wife touches his cheek rubs his foot and I think of that house ​on tulip street and instead of seeing the prison guard, I see the height chart etching the growth of my sons in the kitchen ​and the watermelon vine outback climbing the bricks, pulsing so alive, ​just as the man whose more like a dad than my own goes to speak his wife pulls out a packet of biscuits ​before his lips even part, feeds him silent. death will not remember that your favourite ​meal of the day is breakfast but watching them, now you know, that if your life bares you one luck it will be finding someone like she is, to him, and you will not have to ask because it’ll be there, on a table in a house that feels like laying under that mango tree, porridge, with a side of fried eggs.