Turquoise Monster

You think that because I pour my feelings on to the page, that I can not really feel. You think that shallow self aggrandisement leads me to this. You think that in sharing my pathos is divided. You think wrong of me, misunderstand the need to express to self, these hidden bits. You misquote how I share to feel not alone, to not drown in incomprehensible sensation. You do not see the life line – my lines of text thrown to others, merely a life line, like me, like you – the Selfish poet you say. The apathetic artist growing fat on self indulgence. I ask Just look at the messages that are scattering at your feet. Maybe one day you will actually look before we are dead.

The fighting monsters dance
As if life long partners
Graceful, instep – aggression
Lost in the fluidity
Of movement
Monsters together
After all only a monster
Can ever truly fight a monster
Now they are locked
In an eternal embrace.

How many ghosts wonder these halls
How many souls lost
Echos of the now
And remembrance of the before
Locked in the fabric
Matted to the core

How many iterations
Of tragic moments flow
How many yous
How many mes
How many us-es
That were or could never be?

Dark turbulences
Caught knotting it all
Swirling to ensnare
Tangled beware
How much hatred
Can one garden grow?
You reap what you sow

If I am gone
Iron butterflies will adorn my grave
Do not mourn freedom to run
Without pain
Soaring through a world
Of coloured warmth
Existence’s tunes thrumming a cord
To climb out of this life
Through a gate of light
Becoming iron
Swimming in liquid sun
The butterflies wings
Beating out ordered chaos
My pattern is the smallest
My geometry is the greatest
I am but part of the fractal of eternity.

The images of the city where obscured
Distorted, kind of hidden
But the pieces where there
The arches and cafes
Gun turrets and cigerette smoke
All the Romes that had ever been
Over lain and synched
A slight misalignment
Gave delicious snapshots
On occassions the warm twilight shifted
Showing the city as it could be
Music and horns
The smell of the hills
Accompanied such visions
Until they blurred back into the present

Writing from Art The Wilson Gallery Cheltenham March 2017

The street loomed in the silver light
Or rather it lurched as it luminesced
Moon beams reflected a muted rainbow
Just at the edge of perception
A reflexion of it’s own subtle glory
Hung distorted in the river’s ripples

A lonely figure wrapped in trench coat
With broken seams jerked like a lost puppet
Caught on every word and miss-remembered cues
A hope burned within the creature
That one of the candescent windows
Would open and beckon them in

Frost began to rim the moon
Diffusing the light to a crystal shimmer
Spreading out and clogging in the air
With ice that hurt the lungs to breath
The light now was nothing but glitter
Obscuring the murder of Unknown

Writing from Art – a visit to the Wilson March 2017

Red tiles, over red brick
Some more orange, others dirty brown
The roof top sagging
Under weight of baked clay
Keeping assorted timber dry
It warped and yearned
Until men built of muscle came
Sweat slicked
Even in cold grey months
They move and shift each piece
Again and again
As each makes it’s circuit
From green wood to ready timber
No bowing is allowed
Beyond the little yard
Docks sprawl
At it’s back the city, trussed
But busseling with the clamour of the day
Not yet fulling grown from it’s township
Soon the time of metal will be
And the sagging roofs will sag to collapse
Boards rotting
Homes to nothing but beetles
And stray cats.

Written in response to the exhibition in The Wilson Gallery, Cheltenham March 2017.

Jagged drinks for the eye
Landscapes of texture
Dripping, sagging, oozing
Peaking up frozen
Wavelets
Diminished into regularity
Repeat, retrieve, remake
Copies not exact
Learning a scatter
Of new from old
Forms reborn
Syntax looms in loops
Half formed
Floating on and on
A clank
Wobble of endurance
Zoning to grey

Brains switched on
Axons firing
Knowledge stores – ACTIVATED
Commence writing!

I am hinged in the Middle
I am a book with two front covers
Two stories interleaved
Ones upside down and back to front
But flip me over
And it’s the other way round

I am a thought cascade
I am an idea intrusion
Scientist and Artist
Creative mind
Non-linear: mold breaker
I am hinged in the Middle