from throwing away
the exercise book he never used
when he was in Secondary Two.
Or maybe this has failed to matter:
the past with the protracted
trauma of his disappointment
and the silence he built
like a wall around his love
the day he saw my wrists
break to the rhythms of conversation
I had with friends
he despised because they were
unmanly and non-Catholic.
Pages of the book
fell cleanly away from the spine
when I first opened it
in the hope of finding some rash
confession scribbled along the fading
blue lines across the yellowish-white.
As for those remaining pages,
I use them now to compose my poems.