D E C O R A T I V E  A R T S

It could be a clock,

 decorative for your mantlepiece.

Specifically yours,

the sort of piece that feels unimaginable 

placed next to the shabby Russian icon 

and statue of Goethe 

that are mine.

To make this work,

casually or otherwise,

in any home

(this pink confectionary cake)

I think you would have to, 

as here,

change the background.

As that grey gradient

shifting to darkness,

against the columns in agate

and golden putti; 

it is becoming. 

And it is well that 

this must be the only item in the room.

R A P H A E L  C O L L E C T I O N

And when you enter the world of light;

for an interior, the shadows are at best

unconvincing.

It is the unformed idea of the School of Athens,

its ephemerality that makes it so 

affecting and sad.

The charcoal smudge of the frieze,

Aeschines unfinished arm 

Averroes or Ibn Rushd ابن رشد‎; arm similarly incomplete,

first man to identify the retina;

and Plato and Socrates are, of course, together—

though Socrates has his back to his student. 

Neither looks at each other,

an unread message

or a read message and no response?

As that letter that I couldn't return,

to live in a city with Raphael.

A boat ride away,

the swift engines and the flickering lights on the river.

R O Y A L  A C A D E M Y

 and coursing back

through the past

to a different river, 

that summer was full of the impossible

the cruelness of time

Vienna, the return

the conversation

the quietness, I remember so many parties

the apartment was so full of friends

it felt as if everyone had come

the mezzanine bedroom, so narrow

laying beside her, and walking 

she had nothing to do and was bemused

it was bemusing to everyone

I stopped taking phone calls

crisis meeting

goodbye dinners

politese

it was a relief to be honest

to have the silence, the moon over the south west,

as I could see this grand future

stretching out

like Budapest

except when we arrived, Seb and I,

a man's excrement was laying in the streets

right there by the train station

and everyone was in camouflage tracksuits

and I sat curiously close to the Queen

M U S E U M  S T U D I E S

And closeness, like opening a pdf. And what is really denotes: sitting right next to him, like right next to him. So close the disdainful face showed the rivulets of sweat, even that early in the morning. The morning light on the distended face of the surreal wallpaper, where do you get such a large face to float sinister on your wall? How do you even start asking that question. It was Singapore, maybe Hong Kong, details being easy to change and reform. The detail of the morning being so uncomfortable, the pressing heat of the morning. The curtain all bunched up, what need for curtains when you are up all night? Why curtains in a cafe? And I was given a fedora, for the season. I gave a book on anxiety and a book on typography. A fair exchange. Told this hat suited me, which felt like a backhanded compliment. Felt like a jibe, like her teeth as tombstones, like the face like Frankenstein. Which worked as I was laying side by her on the ground of that windowless stairwell. In the cinema, my blue shirt bunched into black jeans. Afterwork like nighthawks at the pool hall, the city lit by amber light. The tourist shops with their lambswool, with their merino possum, Japanese signage. And it all sort of floats distended, the past and makes ghosts of us all.

P I C T U R E S  A T  T H E  K A F K A  E X H I B I T I O N

We walked somber, like museum tableaus 

blinding rays toward to iron symbol of progress

and I'm sitting there all defensive

it is impossible to find a record of the hotels

by the station, was different 

of course, on the continent

and how Chris always says I become boorish,

where they had laid out all his entire draft of the Metamorphosis

and his hotel had been five minutes away

cleared away as so much had, but the museum still stood

and the girls either side of me have 

such a sullen disposition

and here's this patron saint

daughter of a waterman, the river being so much more dangerous in the past

except this is Paris, and it is not Berlin and not London

and despite the thrill of Waterloo station, all these shadowy figures 

are moving away into the past, and I am making grand pastoral gestures,

and you are removing my paintings from the wall

                                                                                                  L A T E   S U M M E R  D I G E S T 

Through the city the canal

 tear ducts, 

the shiftless summer light,

in the awareness of the secret corridors

roaming servants thorough with their intrigue

so fresh, their baskets bristling with perch and pike

for their masters,

the gap between servant and servir, 

like the flickering light through elm trees

the blossom of nightly calm all musical

the houses stepped up like wall, a common weal,

 from vallus or stake

the encrustations protuding out the pink brick, 

temporary like fête stalls

to be the sweet darling of the afternoon, 

languid against the fields, and palaces of the merchants

and the wealth like a secret dawn

actuary and alum, 

the walls filled with bouquets of the wildest hue

impossible springs with semper augustus and every tulip

and the oil fields were silent 

and she would hold my hand,

the coarse linen of her dress a warning

the shock of red, pulling ever deeper into the canal

eyes looking too deep into the years which bend slightly, 

trace a heaving memory

 E X P O R T / I M P O R T

And we are delighted to offer our services, both in the maintenance and protection of this imperial trade. Let this golden sea temper a further expansion of our well wishes. They remain worlds separated, the torrid golden clouds and black abyss shapes register themselves furtively in the event of their docking, they exist in the export and import of grave portent, not unlike certain raptors, voracious and cruel, as if they held certain truths, or leaned on the prow of their hardwood ships awaiting their prey. In their malignant presence, prior ports became beacons, as if they were no more distance than a days journey to Batavia or Antwerp and soon their cruelness had become an operating system, a shape they carried around with them, inscrutable and irreconcilable. 

As if they were external, their representations were essentially comic, and their new island home consisted of two lines of buildings, curiously articulated.And there is a scale model, and the prefecture is going wholesale into reconstruction, which ultimately equates to a grand emptiness, that fails to reveal anything about the past. About the hooded eyes and silent prayers of the merchants, how the imperial rulers held the emperor at a disdained distance. And how both joined together to sing their multi-lingual aria, as a restoration prayer to the dwindling farmlands, and to re-educate peasants whose literacy rate had been in constant decline. And they would sing together, and their song would fill the flatlands of Europe with such beautiful majesty, that the peasants would pause, their dykes stopping the North Sea’s unfulfilled desires to reclaim all of that barbarous continent as far as the Duchy of Luxembourg. And the sensation was at first confusing, the emblematic dust, the sonorities being difficult. And the two side by side, with the unfamiliar worsted wool and silk contrasting and glittering off each other. One thinks of corrosion, or mutation. Some rectitude held them back, from a blood embrace. Their balloon trousers and stovepipe hats and fussy lace and dead serious faces. And imparting onto the shore, among the softer wood crates, red lacquer and samovars, amidst the manicured pines. Workers form pallid figures against the golden sky. Is this circulation that which we instantly recognise as Dejima, Exit Island. An opening, the look of miscomprehension when I describe stage left and right to some students. It has very little to do with Exit, and very much to do with venality. 

F I L I G R E E 

And inside those terraced homes

they do so behind a lacemakers horse

chevalet in French, staantje in Dutch

though for such things there are countless local names

dialects being the knots and binds of early modern Europe

homes or cottages

in the Black Country I visited the nail makers cottages

low and sullen buildings

a cottage industry, my grandmother looked displeased

not at the grime, just at the change in routine

In the brick houses four women share the light

Each of them lives in their memories.

If one moves to the carreau the others use the gaps in the light

to move their fingers to loop over the pins down to the bobbins

arranged on the floor.

One woman knows the coldness of the floor

If she closes her eyes she remembers the spring.

One barely touches the floor. Her feet have stepped through the front door 

towards the canal for more than a century.

T R U M M E L F R A U

and I am passing Hella Rebel's grave once more

the difference in German cemeteries

is in the fastidiousness

as if death is neat 

as if the the centuries of loss

of women cleaning up and sweeping the pergamon altar

are expectations

how easy it is to become a stone

as at Pompeii grafting

 holes between the houses

the incisions form savage doorways

we went out to look at the fat full moon

shivering through the trees

Cornish winter

furiously stopping the flies as they pass overhead

              

                                                                                                                                S C R I M S H A W

Carving lines into the bones of whales, the lines come out all blackened over time, coal dust. We buried their young swimmers into set nets, vulgar jagged harpoons cutting through the black water, all of us dragging a line behind the serious ships. Dragging these wounded breathing creatures out, gasping, suffocating in the unfamiliar air. Water dripping down through the caulking, this wetness like a cloak, a cover. Knives gouging into ivory, is it ivory on a walrus or is it just bone? And we would set fires on decks, and above the great hulking cauldrons rendering severed whale into oil dark clouds announce us like heralds. How the decks did not set afire, a terrifying conflagration on the black ocean? Burning flames on the horizon. And they reproachfully wait underneath waiting for the shadowy hulk to descend, uncomprehending why they never come to join in the new song. Whales learn new songs and they pass across oceans, new melodies for the long migrations.  Underneath the ocean, species lie in wait for the descent from above. Tearing, destroying.  But there, the ocean is vast so let us focus our eye on an darkened boat, hold in your attention on this vessel as we carve in the details; a working vessel, lit by swinging whale oil lights, the remembered whaling songs, hummed low and mournful. If we glide closer, so all the other features are blurred and inconsequential, a taupe grey and in focus a man’s blackened skin, soot and ash and indigo lines of a life of evenings tattooing the skin, the intimacy of those evenings, the closeness of a mans hand. Always the smell of death passing through the decks. And then, not because of the ocean but because of this sense of a definite end, of a desiccation, of the past.  I am back with you, you next to me. You felt as if you went away, and you did you went on a journey, coursing the new lines of discovery. And I felt as if you were still there, an absence in a new bed, an endless recursive dream. The summer made a path on your skin, a delicate pattern of new dapples on your nose. Your eyes still had the same look, but they were distant. Waiting for something new on the horizon. 

It’s later, not much later; but time has elapsed. Time moves in increments and it is hard to keep pace of all the things that are happening; a lover departs on a train, a man buying flowers, a student inquiring about whether if you purchase many items you can return them all, a woman admitted to a customer that she is tired because she works every day, a man with a permanent look on his face, he is always in a tie. Late night, on my bicycle that will get stolen on a rainy night, but not that night,  the city glides by, as in a dream. Houses with frosted windows, the same house but never the same. Hydrangeas at their ending, as they turn to brown husks of the autumn.  A restless slumber. The sky lit by stadium lights, like I am back home. Late night songs on the walk home when I missed a last bus home, that sullen curve of ferry road before it all disintegrated. Shadow impressions of a city. The sky is so horrible at night here, so unfamiliar and unclear. No stars. I sat in the cinema alone in a row to myself, and I would have walked out of the film. A cowboy version of “A Star Is Born”, woozy handheld cameras. I was deeply alone, big mouth billy bass mouthing “Take Me to the River”. 

I had waited for such a long time, to have the feeling of your hand on mine, to have your careful body course the outline of mine. To touch your closed eyelid, the nape of your neck as it disappeared into your striped shirt. You had been so distant for so long, at first in your late nights in the hospital, not your fault and entirely my own. Then in Berlin, this strange language wrapping itself around you, you in your cafe, a club, things that I would not become part of, for fear that I would become too attached to the place, that inevitability of returning home becoming some sort of constellation. Boats filled with treasure. Ambergris. You were so self sufficient, and I was learning to be through you. But it never worked as well for me, I needed that accompaniment, a line in harmony not counterpoint. I need a path carved out for me. A fine line. And I watched you in Berlin, and I asked for you to make the time for me and you for you. But it didn’t happen M, and I sat in impossible Sicilian sunshine alone and I saw my future as that and it seemed normal, as if you were not part of that. And of course I was mistaken, it was not normal and it formed strange blackened courses through the ivory and I was all storm tossed and tumbling forward. But this dark plunge into unfamiliar water has become normal. 

We met at the Tate Gallery, sun came and went as it does in the capital. I said to you then that  “I am experiencing..." I inserted a pause to find the right word, hollow, holowghen, holowen, holwe a hollowed out existence, because you were always my joy and now it is gone.” But on reflection, I am on a journey too and there are many joys, the line of cherry blossoms in the georgian estate, a lovers slender nape and thin delicate blonde hair and where I wanted to have you change your mind at some point, as if you would turn around and tack along side me now I am unsure. I thought at some point in that long summer, you would change your body to lay a long arm over me in the night, and caress my face and convince me of our love. But you didn’t, you passed through those nights and did not talk to me. Or when you would care for me like a sibling, which was sweet and all. And I would run and run away, feeling the absence with the footstep count trying to convince myself that I would be fine and that somehow I was making the right move. These horrendous details that you You asked me to take care of myself, and I am trying to. After you left, the Tate, I tried to get into a park to cry, but there were no seats. So I was adrift floating in this vast unfamiliar ocean of brick. Which I asked for, I wanted to be set adrift. But seeing you in the distance, on the steps to the bowels of the gallery, and thinking of you in this strange new floating life, I could only think of myself, wounded. Blackened ship sinking into the ocean. And you as a boat returning home. And schrimshaw, where I started, tells a history. And I am so inarticulate, and this forms a vague history of love, of a knife sliding through marbled ivory. What colour is ivory?

F O X

I cycled past the fox slowly the first time, tentatively avoiding his newly dead body. 

They look so much smaller and less cunning, when they are dead. 

They look small in general. 

The body lay with the garish stain of new blood against red fur. 

He was decidedly dead and I am so cautious when I cycle. 

So many foxes slyly walking around, they bounce as they walk. 

Low to the ground

 I woke up to find an

eviscerated rubbish bag outside my window. 

Context, cardboard as it disintegrates turns from its gentle brown to the colour of the sky here. 

As the days wore on, the body began to resemble the piles of used cardboard disintegrating outside the lighting shop on my walk to work, 

neatly stacked they looked like an installation. 

The fox became a paper pulp on the side of the road. 

Across the street is a cemetery, the graves propped up by branches. 

The cemeteries over filling, the land higher from all the bodies buried on top. 

The poor stealing wood from coffins in the winter in the past. 

Graves on top of graves, lead lined. 

Everything feels familiar and distant. 

The fox, 

the lighting store, 

the names in the cemetery. 

There are such charming chapels, that are always locked. 

I lay in bed thinking about that of and what it meant, 

whether I was the fox or the fox was a symbol or a portent.