This article delineates Sean Bonney’s ambivalence towards 20th Century sound poetry and his complex relationship with sound and visual poet Bob Cobbing (1920-2002). To do this the article reads one of Bonney’s early poems ‘For Bob, Cobbing Through the Soundhole, Where Cobbing IS’ – a poem Bonney read at Cobbing’s funeral – alongside Our Death, Bonney’s last book. The way Bonney responded to Cobbing’s life and death may offer a guide to how we respond to Our Death after Bonney’s. In their shared commitment to counter state violence, the article identifies an anti-Thatcherite politics alongside a poetics of vulnerability and hospitality, which they extend to each other, to the interned, the displaced and the dispossessed.