The Chemical Wedding Poem by Andrew Buchanan Jackson

The hired van speeds down dual carriageways
containing us who function or don't function
as chemicals trigger off and trigger on
the infinitely occurring, infinitely dissolving images
of blown trash, tarmac, post-war brick,
the image of a wedding in the brain, seeing
our long-lost whose eyes water or remain
painfully dry, committed to their forgetting
as we are to pinning one face to one name,
the single firework of a human life, standing
still in a shower of detonated rain,
flake falling away from flake as
the one mind defoliates, flowering
down through the night air to pollinate
among leftovers of wedding cake, pink rags
of cooked ham, wrinkled balloons, beer cans,
among the assembled silences in which
there is no speech fit to be made,
while outside, on the Dublin city canal,
two snow-white midnight swans paddle by,
steer headlong through confetti, snapping bread.