There is no God, I was made in this man’s image:
those slate-dark eyes of his are mine,
the dented bridge of our his-my nose.
I laugh with his rasping cackle in me.
I walk with his stooping, trudging gait,
swearing his ‘Jesus bloody Christ’
in a sudden fist-curl of temper.
My right ear points like a flesh-antenna as his does,
and being my father I bear his name.
Haphazardries of kin passed on from birth
that to see him wizened on his cancer bed,
his insides turned to water,
is to view my own death, my own Dorian Gray
smiling, weeping in the drug-bliss of sleeping
or counting out life on his fingers:
‘I’ve got more money than I thought,’ he says,
‘and I can’t even wipe my arse.’
I soak a flannel and do it for him,
the first time I’ve touched his privates.
The doctor says he could go on for hours,
but no he won’t, the nurse assures me.
She gives him a last injection.
‘If there’s something unsaid, best say it now.
He won’t wake up from this one.’ 

Now I scatter him in the surf.
This is what a man burns down to:
bone’s grey grit like broken pebbles.
Not ash but grit and blood-brown dust
from the coffin they called Mahogany.
The same salt-’n-pepper as his shaven stubble
that whiskered the sink-white from his razor,
the Brylcreemed hair he palmed skin-smooth
after combing with his tongue poked forward.
Some of him sticks to my swimming hands –
I shudder and dunk to wash him from me,
splash myself like an accidental ritual,
but it’s too late, the symbol remains:
He always stood between me and death,
but now I’m next in line, I inherit his future,
a law bequeathed that’s impossible to alter,
a murder-chain sanctioned as natural.

I’ve already moved into his death:
I’ve tried on his clothes for a decent fit
and sorted the rest for the Salvos.
I used his screwdriver to jemmy the plug
from this beige plastic tube he came in.
It exhaled a false puff of breath.
In a minute I’ll escort my mother from the beach,
her taking my arm like a younger he,
casting his funeral flowers to the shallows.
‘Looks cold that water,’ she’ll worry with a shiver.
‘You don’t think we should have buried him?’
She’ll complain how the pins-and-needles sand
is stinging her legs like mosquitoes.
She’ll hope out loud there’s nothing funny with his will
and expects her sister to be over for a handout.
Then we’ll turn for one more chance to watch
where his slick dissolved in the buckled swell,
stretched into invisibility.
I’ll blink and utter ‘Goodness’ with her
as if death really is a mystery after all
and dwells out there in all that sea and twilight.
But death’s no mystery, not to me, not now.
I am its DNA.