John Gartland |
Forward
through the urgent feet
of shoppers stepping over him
to Dior and designer heaven,
he inches. Drags
his complete hell,
the severed remnants
of his limbs, obscured in rags,
his microcosm of misery
along the filthy street.
A bowl of coins
precedes his belly creep.
He does not lift his eyes
from this dark kingdom
of the dust and spit, the dog-ends,
shit and blue, metallic flies.
The newsprint condemnations of
corruption in high places
only reach his kingdom stuck
to people’s shoes.
Corruption’s his companion.
In this realm he’s truly subject,
and the squalor of the mighty’s
no surprise.
For, trodden underfoot
a man has rags,
but no illusions
left to lose.
Our eyes meet like naked swimmers,
and lazy bolts of primary current
lace the blue grey belly of the afternoon,
swollen with rain.
Thunder like attacking jets.
This bursting deluge pulls us
into urgent waters, undecipherable flow.
Sunken thoughts plop like sudden fish
in the undertow, and dripping hours
are slippery with desire.
Storm swallows up tired liturgies
and pantomimes of priests like
shipwrecks in an ozone dream.
Words swirl in a tidal dance of cells
and poems slip, sleek and silvery
from the broken waters.
The sexual drench of a new sacrament
leaves us joyous, teeming with secrets.
Dead selves beckon, walking on the
water, like dark saints.
A celebrity already,
you sit as model for the famous painter,
flattered by his invitation,
dazzled by his fame,
a major figure, one of Bacon’s circle,
his brutal palette feted by the critics,
much painterly disfigurement to his name.
You sit as model for the famous painter,
an icon to be viewed in future days.
The visual violence done you in this portrait
this brush with immortality allays;
but his art falls with a savage eye on beauty,
such naive minor vanity betrays.
You sit then, mastered by the famous painter,
he battens on such vulnerable grace.
You hoped for immortality,
but you are shaken now to see
malign genius
deconstruct your lovely face.
A gunshot or this paintbrush to the head,
it is the same, the victim’s eyes are dead.
Your flesh now hangs,
a mildewed flag, unfurled.
Through you, poor fool,
he takes his great revenge
upon the world!
Now she spreads her pink umbrella like
a grotto, our drinks upon
a tray of Venetian glass, her bare legs
gleaming with afternoon floods.
Chinese lacquers the colour of electric
coral paint her submarine toes.
The plumskin ghost of insomnia
shadows her eyes, drunk with rain.
She claims to bring a message from the
fountainhead, a giant in bronze,
brooding on the beach among the
white stone nymphs in Raybans.
Words are drowned in surf,
the foreign frequencies of rain.
The fractured dream replays itself
among these rusted sculptures
of the old city, like a faulty disc.
I wake up every few hours
haunted by caffeine;
the whisper of the rain
absolving dawn.
John Gartland can be emailed here.