shoreline

A few poems published in an issue of the delinquent last year. part of a bigger narrative/image/video installation im still figuring out. i thought i’d stick them up here for time being.

#2.

1. I look into a room and the room is empty, and the room is gone. 2. I would take the room as my own; the room belongs to emptiness – it has long suffered. 3. The emptiness speaks as an enjoiner, forbidding any mercy toward actuality or any element, tool or word with sharp grace. 4. So I take the room and I fill it with lank and gangle structures and I fill it with anatomies of future jungles; sequences of life objects: pelican lamps, bicycles, peregrine trees, wood carvings of giraffes and borzoi wolves, gharials on pedestals, thousands of sun dials, rakes, oscilloscopes, water turbines, rusting hulls, nail claws, swans and bones. 5. I charm them into exclamations, into flurries of wild currency. 6. I say ‘freeze! hold that there’. The objects are my subjects. 7. I spend hours and hours positioning par cans and flares to illuminate the room from the ground. 8. I get it right. 9. I paint the shadows that the subjects created – every detail, driven onto the walls. 10. I remove the subjects so that the room is empty. Is the room empty now? I remove the room back to its emptiness.

#15

Thorns
menace
a river path.

Teen devils
murk
a river town.

I notice
as time passes
an orchid swelling
on the jaw
of the current.

I notice
vim and sparkle
stray from the eye.

Only shapes
eclipsed
by towers of
contorted angelica.

Hidden.

And up:
Cerulean is black.

And along:
malachite is gone.

Driven out.

All that remain
are those in the shadows.

#37

Often, in noises, smells and colours, I recognise from memory
or a connection to childhood that reminds me at a bus stop,
or the curve of a motorway valley, or an abandoned cafe in
Bexhill or Athens or Berlin, like a lady that i have never met,
who stands in the shadows, or in a cage.

Like a body behind the sun, trapped. Where it must be only
black and completely black. There is no need for faith when
the end is there from the very beginning.