Whenever I yawn on the lawn

with my sister’s toy poodle on my lap,

he cranes his neck to sniff my breath.

What is it about the odour

of my lungs that makes him snuffle it

down like a muzzleloader?

Does a whiff at those moments,

looking down his nose,

show the echt aspects of my psyche

in tea leaf respects?

When you yawn, your entire head

scrunches. For just an instant

your thoughts short-circuit, adjourn,

reset, and wring

out with the exhalation.

Raf could be catching the eye

of the thought in my sigh / the waft of

cognition / the fragrance

from half-baked ideas.

As he sniffs, his pupils dilate,

scouring the roof of my mouth

with those big grapes in case

essence has a presence

within the ridges of rugae.

He seems bothered there might be something in there

stealing air – in cre men ta lly

impelling the yawn from the beginning.

My suspicion is: steeped

in the lower lobe where

the alveoli only inflate at the apex

of an earnest breath, one’s soul is found,

stuck at some juncture

between blood and air,

slushing like flotsam – coral

in spume. The ethereal spirit glugs

around bronchiole depths as gas

rushes in faithfully to replace the vacuum

that would otherwise set in –

the same wet flapping

you get at the bend near the end

of a toilet unclogging.

I submit as proof: dead people

don’t breathe. They become sans soul

matter once their chests cave in.

Ce léger parfum est mon âme.

You can’t spell ‘spiritual realm’

without the words

‘real’ or ‘ritual’.

What’s the running theory

on the soulless sophisticates

Theophile Gautier begrudgingly

bootlicked with popularist critique?

It must take the kind of yawn drawn

long enough, only the languor

and insouciance of privilege

could stent an exit

wide enough, for the soul to slip up

and out one’s oesophagus – only

to dispossess its host, husked

of any moral sustenance,

of any fair heir left in there.

Grandad’s spirit left with his final breath.

I know this because he flinched a little and gurgled.

Whilst upright, a thin line of pearlescent drool

oozed from his mouth that night,

up his cheek and into his eye.

On account of this, pro tem,

I’m a little sceptical of Sir Isaac Newton.

It’s safe to say I’m in no need

of exorcism or a discount deal

at the Tobin Brothers’.

Each time I set the seal

back on a yawn, Raf sinks

back in my lap as if

I’ve caught him in the act,

severed mid-séance –

a conditioned avoidance response.

Hopefully he’s just content

ectoplasm isn’t gathering in the chaps of my lips.

Which is not to say it has evaporated

hitherto or gathered since.

The flicker in his eyes might

simply be embarrassment –

that one of his humans

is comprised, at his core,

of vacuousness and regrettably

a fair pocket of chronic miasma.

I do, after all,

yawn lavishly

and have asthma.