Art works

∞

After Godot

Falling through the broken slats of a sterile sleep, fear and love tumble in incandescence.

Love whispers:

For all the times you felt alone, no one to gather you in their arms. to say it will be ok, to say I love you, someone to say you are good and whole, strong and proud until gypsum cold fear crumbles by a smile, a touch. To catch you, a promise to be kept. I am the killer of doubts, the vanquisher of falsehoods. I am the gossamer promise that brushes your brow, the sigh, I am here. Hush now.

Fear screams:

You will not touch me, you will hurt me, I will touch you so you can’t abandon me. I will hurt you so you can’t hurt me, I will hurt me before you can hurt me. I will run away when you need me so that you can never reject me. I will touch you so you don’t touch me. I will leave before you enter, I will enter when you leave. I will look but will not touch. I will not hope. Stay away from my hopelessness. I will not dream. Stay away.

Fear whispers: I love being wrong. Love shouts: now we are right.

Fear looks over its shoulder at love, slowly holds up a hand, and exits.

I must fix that door, says love.

∞

Strength in letters

Thick gilded words flow easily among friends
Though thinner and lighter as the rubble settles.
Blinding darkness of an awakening claims
A crowd of new love as old words peter out.
Dwindled to three words that remain unsaid
To retain their power they must be applied
Like a smooth ointment to your lips
Sipped and whispered in the cold light of day.

∞

Automaton – a life in cogs

A dreamer’s vision apportioned to each piece,
whirr of gears signal disorgan function.

Certain, this birth of slotting and sliding,
wheels, needles, spacer, shim, copper gumption.

Head-turn, eye-roll, hand-clench, click,
Simulacrum jerks into thoughtless motion.

A stolid opprobrium-sheen of unaware,
impassive spectacle wound tight in plosion.

Desire-born, tense, a shamblesplate friction,
a lonely notion of a heart laid bare.

∞

Fool’s Circel

The King’s palace is no place for fools,
Yet you trudged your way up there, your mind full of me
Widdershins you dallied concentrically,
With the ghost of what you thought you were;
You circel still, and I am free.

∞

Red light

Both taut and unripe, terrible and tender
Calibrating resistance and flight, distance and time,
Mother and son weather their thunderderstorms
in revolt and foregone conclusions.

He won’t cross when it’s red, “it’s against the law”,
Sturm und drang, he knows what’s right,
she tells him Hitler was a great respecter of the law
as he rolls over and goes to sleep.

Run with her, come with her, he will not
Stay and wait, go on a bit, lag more then stop
Pushing on, how far away is nearly there?
She will come back to me, a simple cycle.

The door shatters as red abandon spatters on the floor
“Do you still want me here? You don’t love me.”
His rejection expressed in vomit at three am
A small boy again curled in her arms in the half light.

“I won’t wear those trousers, no weight on me
The world is heavy enough to bear, I love you,
Your work left me singing songs alone, you’re stupid,
It should always have been only me.”

He draped on her knees, long limbed and unsure,
“Until my last breath, I will love you, I will be with you,
Practice now so that you forge your way, write until you see,
Listen until the light goes red again, and you cross anyway”.

∞

The Grammar of relations

A prefix spills from your lips, a snarled suffix from mine
to take away and add sum of two parts, as if love could be anything else.
You see it is the sum of acorns and fallen leaves,
I only see you.

∞

Border

If a shaft of light through branches is enough to show the chaos, the light of day reveals the matted sinew of us. Covered carefully in a phosphorous glow, each one protected from the other’s thoughts.

An incandescent haze emanates from the ground and we rise with it, content to let it lead us without further thought, without any thought. Inside it, we bare our teeth with false emotion to the sweetest truth, only to run and leave it for dead.

Outside it there is fear, darkness and an ending. We can’t go there. We must go there. Dwelling within its confines is the lazy death of dreams. A step out lays us bare and squinting on the way to uncertain darkness, the reality of us. The beauty of us.

∞

Meat 

I realised soon enough that just because you don’t eat animals does not mean you don’t eat people.

As you lick the blood splash from your chin with satisfaction. A vegetarian, you claim.

Was it me then I thought of, or you, when I filled your absence with ideas? When you went hunting for organs to stuff your gaping wounds with, did you consider that the flesh of others was not yours to take?

Not really.

Your hunger consumes you, those wounds still unhealed. Insatiable, alone.

Enjoy your salad.

∞

A pig’s ear

Down around the winding stairs, careful, while running, to be sure of foot
A transcendant purity lies below,
it would be a hard descent,
but I’ll not fall today.
To reach anywhere doesn’t impel me as much as the running does
So I stop halfway to hear the the shifting hypnotic cacophony of the chicadas and crickets
come up to meet me.
I go no further and let the flawed raw cut shape of me
sing my song of calm as I start to ascend.
To make a wrong thing right again, you have to go back.
I reach into my pocket and find a bee, she has chosen me,
And I go back,
Just as I go on.

∞

How to: Instructions  

Tools: 1. A brush (with death/life/bristles) 2. An ocean (large size) 3. Pigment (all there is)  4. A mountain (medium large) 5. A bell 6. A rubber.

1.With every stroke of the brush a light will go on, a dark light that will cast its shadow brightly over dimly-lit beginnings. This then the process whereby shapes are formed. Here an ear; a series of fragile rock ledges spriralling toward a sanctum. There, a hand and foot; antlers and branches reaching from the cracked earth to clutch at straws. There again, a beaked nose; A light whiff of togetherness, a longer snort of tribe. Here an eye: eyeballing the tide, smoothing the imperfections, swivelling just to show off. At this point, hold the hand to stop it from smudging and close the eye to stop it from judging.

2. Take the ocean and fold the edges carefully over your mind, taking care not to crease or rip the edges. Leave to dry. Moving slowly, circumnavigate the bottom of the mountain by putting one foot in front of the other and listen to the mountain call in silence. Follow the “to the top” signs. Every hour, sit and ring the bell to hear yourself and warn the sheep you are there. Tip: If you have no bell, try singing, the sheep won’t mind and you won’t have to apologise. When you get to the top, do not stop. There is no top. There is only the mountain. Be awkward about it.

3.  Spread the pigment over everything you can’t see on your way down, careful not to get any on the colour that is already there. Mix everything thoroughly. When everything has been well blended and there are no lumps, use the rubber to erase everything until you are left. You hear a heart beat and breath exhaled. The sound of imperfection, the essence of earth, stone, water, fire and decay.  The dried veins of a crumbling leaf laid bare in the autumn wind. Rinse and repeat.