"Nocturn"
Last night, awake in the clay, my incompetent blinds letting in the lights,
we hosted the Bal de Tabarin. I’m sorry. You weren’t invited. The pieces of the week and things I can’t find homes for
took up any space I might have made had I known you were in the market for it.
In any case, I pushed you out of view, and in the furthest most foreign corner of my eye
(right about the point at which the floaters like to swim out to the centre) I caught a glimpse of those fish-scale freckles;
sequins from a dress that nobody really liked but said it looked nice anyway. And in this lumbering half-fold I dove
down
down
down
down to the deepest part a human vessel can go and then a little further
down to the point at which it no longer seemed a dream,
Reality screaming, “I’m here! Don’t do this.”
Blurring at the edges, I went down to where I no longer really knew myself and all those in attendance were just fish in a bowl, forgetting themselves in piecemeal.
Why not?
Now awake and awaiting the car crash wake up call, all I can see are streetlight trees
where the night is not so black and endless, but orange, throbbing and as if about to fall
suspended I am one of the bronze-locked swans of some unkempt wench, the same – it’s possible – as one of a pair linked by a golden chain
But now the nape just knows it as Noose and when deluge down my splintering hill
cascades in conveyor belts once more beckoning the mill’s return, should I stand like I stood before or plunge
into the plummets of a world-under-wave? It’s a tempting thought, you must admit. Admit it.
Can I ask you something?
Am I losing myself here?
Nowadays it feels as if there mightn’t be much there left to lose.
She’s hard to please, you see.
Again.
Face made babied, scratching naked asphalt, the contours mostly slip
and eddy themselves
into a gloopy mesh ready for the violet hours where I’m brother to one of those Surrealist jobs.
Prince of Paradox.
My pink and stinky kingdom of Paradox where nothing adds up and no sentence sufficient in body or mind can hope to be flung or strung together.
She’s hard to please, you see.
Do you know what I mean? Of course, you don’t. How on Mars could you? I’m not even sure that I do.
Artwork also by Lenny Buckley
