 The Word is my shepherd, Rachel Clare A little boy is in a lift. He is wearing red shorts and a soft yellow t-shirt. He stands close to his silent mother. So close he can feel the fabric of her coat without her noticing. He is a fearful child and, as they descend, each floor carries its own clutch of catastrophe. She doesn’t say much. He says even less. When the door opens and the light comes in, he doesn’t race out. His younger brother does. His younger brother charges at the world, laughing, babbling, a fearless emperor of wherever he roams. He and his mother follow. They are off to the post office to cash a cheque. The post office, also a newsagents, is squashed beneath the block next to theirs. On sunny days the overhanging balcony devours the light and you are dizzy as you enter the shop. His eyes, always watchful, adapt quickly. He knows what he wants, he doesn’t know why. Whilst his mother approaches the man behind the glass shield, whilst his brother slaps at the colourful packets hanging from a rotating display stand, he steps, head down, to where the children’s books are layered. Glimpses of what lies inside drawing him in. His small hand reaches out and plucks a book from this compendium of dreams. For a moment, his eyes follow the black marks on its cover. He cannot make out the words, he cannot make out any words. He opens the book and begins telling the story of the book. He speaks gently into the silent air of the shop. For a shy boy, this is a Herculean act but he is lost. Clipping her purse, his mother turns from the glass and approaches his performance. Without looking up, without halting the fall of words, he sees her smiling. She stops next to him, listening. Then, her hand reaches out, takes the book from his thin fingers, closes it and places it on the shelf above the one he took it from. He wants to tell her that he hasn’t finished reading the story, but, he cannot read and she is heading for home.  A boy reading, J.H. Dowd We are born into a world of stories. Stories help us hoist shape onto a world that is chaotic, unpredictable, uncertain. Stories give us a place in the world and place the world within our grasp. Each family has - if it still shares words with each other - its repertoire of stories. In the repeated telling these stories calcify. For some, they are clung to, for others they are claustrophobic. Some of us struggle to climb from the crippling family narrative. We limp from it, slowly finding a way to walk in a story in which we are a richly drawn, complex, uncategorisable characters existing in a world with others who share our full humanity. If you look out the window today, you may think what's the point: why tell stories when the maddest, loudest, selfist voices are filling the air with their howls. Or, as the writer Elif Shafak puts it in 'Writing Is a Dog's Life' and Other Thoughts: What is the purpose of fiction, really what is the point of rolling up your sleeves and labouring to craft a delicate sentence, carefully selecting the ideal synonym, or perfecting the punctuation, only to describe imagined events and invented characters when the world outside is on fire? In her playful and poignant piece Shafak refuses to rise from the retreat of her bed, refuses the role of writer because "the world has gone off its axis." In her funk, she is visited by three writers, Jalaluddin Rumi, Albert Camus and Anna Ahkmatova and bemoans how much simpler things were in their times. Perplexed, they each recite their litany of an era's suffering: From plague to purges, from famine to foreign invasion, from cesaseless violence to political malaise and personal sickness. Chastened, Shafak peels off the duvet because: no matter how bewildering and debilitating our world, we write poetry, we write prose, we write our resilience, hope, empathy, and love for pluralism, nuance and diversity, we write our shared humanity through the chaos of our times  1000, Rachel Clare I have always told stories. I spent my childhood retreating from the world and constructing stories in which I could play a more active role than the one I had in reality. And, in which the world's axis may spin in a different direction. The impulse has never left me. Inside this ageing body, I remain a child, I remain a story teller. I keep returning to the playground. Language is a playground: Digging into the mound of words and throwing or placing them together, trying to swing from one phrase to another, sliding through sentences to the whoosh of musicality is a form of absorption, engagement, of being alive. This week I reached a milestone: One thousand daily poems. Every day, since the 26th May 2022, I have written a poem that explores something - an incident, an idea, a book read, a dream, an exhibition, an emotion - from the day before. When I told a friend last week that I was about to reach the thousandth poem, they marvelled at the discipline. It isn't discipline, it's a necessary delight. It's serious play. In celebration of the milestone I have selected six poems to post below. Maybe there's something in there to delight you.  Maria or Maria Friday 10th January 2025 She has two faces one is revealed in playful guise after her demise the other is dead in her living eyes breathe voice escapes yet the shape is shot with the desire for history’s excising there are no lines in her flesh to rouse the lines she must speak her collapse is a calling to life there she is as credits roll a real character hurt and happiness in a look that flies caged there she is why was she hiding behind a broken ode to fame  Three days left Wednesday 11th December 2024 We do not notice the darkening we are crouched in to small comforts laughter, the faces of others, another pint death pulls up a chair with an offer you’ve only three days left with this fragile breath, what do you do some say heroin is a house worth visiting others want to plunge in alcohol’s pool I would want more of this this sharing of laughter, language dancing between listening hearts, and us not noticing the darkness when it comes  Life, Love & Death in Sicily Tuesday 11th February 2025 After the Letizia Battaglia exhibition at The Photographers Gallery The world does not exist in black and white yet it does shade into the mastery of drama where good, evil, innocence and a brown, is it, bag of bread, clutched close to a child’s chest as she chomps on the torn crust offers some protection from the troubles of complexity, shoot, if everything could be parcelled up and labelled, knotted string strangling the struggle beyond naming, then I wouldn’t be such a mess, thank god for Letizia and the shadows which sounds like the name of a band, she sings bloody songs framed for us to sway before chapter and verse fat feet, hard skinned, the patina of a fathered land soiling her soul, there’s no easy ascension in colour despite the martyrdom of mopping, slopping, sautéing, baking raking through a child’s hair for lice and dreams most dreams are dead, murdered in infancy, a nation of ideology got there early, placing the gun in eager boy’s hand, who doesn’t want to be like the swaggering men who have stuffed death into a sack and dropped him, weighted, in to the Tyrrhenian Sea, they are blind to the constant pop of bubbles breaking the surface  A practical madness Tuesday 17th September 2024 The morning begins with murderous thoughts I know nothing about the drosophila melanogaster only my desire for destruction of the hordes hanging on the sherry bottle, sleeping on our painted angel investigating the cool enamel of the sink, they creep from damp sponge, like most battles the scent of futility seeps into the bloodlust in last year’s staging the whip of the towel splattered hundreds against mirror and white wall before the triumphant flick brought our source of light’s shade clashing with a fragile bowl under the drunken direction of a swaggering war god, both lost their shattering a sure sign my mettle wouldn’t shape a warrior rampant zeal has been swallowed by researched stealth, patient hands glugs of wine are shared amongst the jars, sugar sprinkled with spells a drop of washing up liquid to clog their tiny black pads the vinegar fly, the pomace fly the banana fly will die their fifty day stay cut short sozzled in the red of my Rioja  When the moon darkens Sunday 30th October 2022 Madness dances next to us all sometimes in murderous dress sliding along the platform before possessed arms thrust out and push us to unguarded rails others have brothers who run naked their chakra leading the third eye a merry dance amidst the traffic & then there are those whose silent descent is witnessed behind the closed doors of intimacy where lethargy & lunacy take turns at the sticks to drum the beat or let it fall fearful screams of the paranoiac slipping into silence, rigid, catatonic until the final chaotic outburst from where no one returns frightened shrieks score the quiet & hell is let loose until the ambulance arrives & dancer is bound in a jacket, straightening them out for a drugged absence there are no jazz hands in this farewell  A sketch Friday 8th September 2022 After Ferdinand Hodler His wife waits whilst he watches her die a model lover lying in death’s slow sheeting anguish is drawn in to the bed’s penciled grid as looking is dried into detailed drawing twenty times he renders her to stiff paper little flesh left, thin legs end in the heft of patent leather shoes, rosary beads snake the clenched hands that hold her weightless frame from flying to a final disappearing, tears cannot come, they will smudge the artist’s eye
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 Buster builds a shelf Andrew Huberman is in my kitchen. His voice, thick with certainty, booms from a body he has spent time building. Huberman, an American neuroscientist, is a how to kind of guy. You know the type: thinking about people in the same way you think about putting up a shelf. Drill a few holes, screw in some battening, lay down your wood and, hey presto, you have a beautiful borderline personality shelf or an easily manufactured mahogany narcissist. He is talking to Bill Eddy, a man of gentler mien, before the blade of conviction cuts through. Having mounted the pulpit from the gleaming steps of data, he recites the percentages for paranoiacs and histrionics who are out there in this dangerous ol’ word these guys are gonna tame. A friend had sent me the Huberman Lab podcast on How to Deal with High Conflict People. Not, I think, or hope, because she thought I was one, but that I would find it interesting. I did. Not, perhaps, for the reasons she imagined. This laboratory, like most in science and selling, is in the business of exploration only as a path to the solid house of solutions. Proofs or predictions to trim the world. I lasted thirty two minutes and five seconds. The two and a half hour podcast, like the world it inhabits, is broken into manageable bite size chunks that can be labelled, packaged, consumed. At 38:54 you can chew up Negative Advocates; at 1:37:27 you can spit out a Combative High-Conflict Individual and the gobs of Blame. After, both men have painted the past in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer technicolour, they tell all of their listeners, children be warned, how the world has gone Bergman black and you must never get engaged, or marry, until you have known the person for 365 days. Huberman then does a snake oil routine for one of his sponsors who produce the only vitamin he ever lets into his temple. I snapped. The shrinking of complexity coupled with the brazen selling of a better self, had me broken. I was about to hurl the speaker into the oven with my Friday night fish, when I thought What Reason Could I Give. Not to the destruction of certainty or the certainty of destruction for the speaker, but the beautiful Don Cherry duet with Bobo Stenson. I usually cook with musical accompaniment and Huberman had remninded me why. Music rescued me from the madness. I switched from the attempt to straitjacket the world into explanation, to swaying in my kitchen not knowing where I was. If you don't know the track, give it a listen, it might take you somewhere.  The Crossing II (Famine Horse), Ken Currie, 2024 Artists work in their own laboratories, but - unless it is within the technical, material or formal elements of a medium - they are not in search of certainty. Certainty chokes. For artists, - and some clinicians: Oliver Sachs, for example, who once said, I would have to know someone's whole biography before I offer a diagnosis - there are no answers, only explorations, questions, playing. A path to who knows where. This is why art - poetry, music, painting - is such rich terrain and the threat that it faces from the explainers and quantifiers needs to be resisted. We must not let the rationalising mind erode art's "tendency to celebrate the purposeful purposelessness." as Jed Perl wrote in The New Republic, back in 2014:
Artist, Ken Currie, one of the so called "New Glasgow Boys", has just exhibited his latest paintings, The Crossing at Flowers Gallery, London. These are pictures of terrible beauty. There is not much light but there is life. And one of the joys at being at a smaller gallery is there is no text on the wall. You have to look, take time to engage, think, feel and travel across, and into, the canvas. All of the paintings, tender and unbearable, are exquisitely painted, full of rich detail and a fine application of paint. Currie has turned his brush to create a world that is hard, unforgiving, absurd, fascinating, ambiguous and unsettling. Having stood before them once, I went back for a second looking and wrote this: The Crossing I return to Ken’s tenebrous turning of paint to relentless gloom where white hope is dead, haunting the basement with its filleted light stiff legs and arms lift from boat’s stillness in prayer or naked despair, watched over by stern executioners, eyes resting above penitent dresses, suits stitched with night’s thread I tread through his world, keen dread presses my gaze into the blackness a murk made in mans’ mastery where I must look but never live  Ghost cod, Ken Currie, 2023 Ghost cod, an almost two and a half meter high canvas, illuminated the basement, its glow, pulling your eyes towards it. This butterflied cod is luminous. You know and don't know what it is a painting of. The lines and light of its caudal fin are intricately rendered. Currie’s use of white captures the solidity and fragility of its flesh, dense patches of colour against lighter strokes and featherings of white fluttering into the darkness. Yet, even what first appears to be a mass of greyish black is dusted and scraped to reveal a pulsing lightness. It is fish, angel, light, it is plummeting and hovering, it trembles and stands solid. It is a wonderful painting without meaning. Unless, of course, it finds its way on to the slab in the Huberman Lab. Then you'll know it's a manic depressive angel trying to escape heaven disguised as a fish. Some people yearn for explanation, I want to hold on to wonder. But, what reason could I give...
I do not claim ownership or rights to any images posted unless stated. If you hold rights to an image that I have used and wish me to change credit ordelete the image, please contact me and I will do so immediately.  When he was dying, my dad brought himself to the threshold of an apology. You were different, he said, I treated you the same as the others (my sister and brother) but you were different. My ill-fitting shape was formed early and I lugged it around the family home weeping into my duffel coat. I was a mummy’s boy but mummy, or mum as we called them, had disappeared behind the veil of valium. I had to find other entertainments or at least some sense of belonging. It took a while. I cried my way through infancy, primary school and seven different shades of duffel coats. I wiped my nose on my grammar school blazer sleeve whilst my peers pulled out their silks and petted their noses. Safe to say, I didn’t belong at home where laughter bordered on ridicule, or at school, where the teacher’s ridicule bordered on a cruel cackling intended to make boys like me shrink back to the council estate where they imagined I belonged. Childhood is the foundry of the soul. Growing up is learning how to hold, carry, comfort, protect that soul.  When I was eighteen I allowed myself to fall in love and, in that love, find some sense of belonging. There had been overtures before but, because of my background, I believed that it wasn’t for me. Headsunk into my shoulders, I was idling along Long Acre in Convent Garden, aching with expectation and fear. I had failed at school and I was making a good stab at failing at life. Something drew me from the street and I stumbled into Hatchards - once one of the oldest booksellers in England, now owned by Waterstones which is owned by Elliot Investment hedge funders - and picked up a book. I had never heard of the author, nor the title - though I think that was the draw : The Vivisector. I didn’t even know what it meant but I felt a strange thrill. I bought the book, went home and started reading. And that was it. Keats had tickled this passion at thirteen but I locked it up, feeling I wasn’t worthy. I was a dullard and literature was for those I’d been to school with, not those that I lived with. I was taken. I remain took. This week I returned to Patrick White’s The Vivisector (1970), a re-reading of a book that brought me to my own threshold of belonging. Forty odd years later, along with an unexpected memory of episodes unfolding when a character’s name is introduced, traces of the thrill remain. Back then, I read everything White wrote, revelling in the worlds built with words and in the brutal longing of his misfit protagonists. The Vivisector is a barbarous and brilliant book.  Les Maisons (1921 ) Chaim Soutine I came back to Hurtle Duffield, White’s artist protagonist, after finishing another story of an artist battling against the conservative mores of religion and society. Chaim Potok’s My Name is Asher Lev (1972) is a much more sedate, less raw telling of that tension. The fronts on which this war is waged are the family and the traditions of Judaism: a father’s dismay that his son should devote himself to such foolishness as art and how the artist's image making is unacceptable within a Hassidic household. Potok creates poignant family scenes - a father's familail love poured into the Z'miros (Shabbat Table Songs), a child watching his mother's collapse and depressed retreat from the world - which make the inevitable implosion much more disquieting. It is a tender rendition of the torment.  Torment and how we treat it are at the heart of Kay Redfield Jamison's latest book, Fires in the Dark (2023). Exquisitely written, sensitive to the shredding of the mind and full of hope, it is an exploration of how we heal and what lives in the hands of those that heal us. Jamison is a compassionate companion who writes about the history of suffering: her own, soldiers, artists and poets and how it has been tended from Imhotep in Ancient Egypt to the analyst's room today. The sea encourages my melancholy And then helps me forget it Wishful Thinking, Douglas Dunn Much of the hope comes in the tending. As wars grind on around us, the book is also a stark reminder of the senseless devastation human's inflict on one another. There are descriptions from nurses at the front of the first world war who sit with young men, holding their hands and softening their fear as they die. There are graphic descriptions of injury before death. There are stories of unbearable agony. And then there are the healers, the nurses, the doctors, the psychotherapists. There is a celebration of the relationships formed in that healing process. There is a fascinating and inspiring portrait of the relationship between the suffering poet, Siegfried Sassoon, and the doctor, W.H.R. Rivers, who tended him:  Rivers believed, one must encourage patients to engage memory. First, to remember what they had pressed out of consciousness. Then, to recollect the unbearble in a more circumspect way; to grapple with the dark forces to obtain mastery over them. To be a healer was to make a patient's "intolerable memories tolerable". It was the doctor's charge, Rivers said, to "use the controlled reflection of horror to understand what the patient has been through, to allow him to meet the horror in his own strength." In the grip of suffering the patient needed to be helped to understand the situation in all its complexity. The doctor should accompany and be as convoy in dangerous waters. Kay Redfield Jamison, Fires in the Dark What else heals? Art? Nature? Love? Reading?
 Bob fleight in den himmel (2023) Georg Baselitz Last Friday, I stood with a friend marvelling at an eighty five year old man’s achievement. His walking frame had scored vital lines into layers of paint. His size forty six shoe was stamped onto a huge canvas which portrayed him and his wife, Elke, upside down. Georg Baselitz is prolific, he is a brilliant painter and he is an old man. To borrow from the bard, sort of, who would have thought the old man had so much paint in him? He does. All of the works in A Confession of my Sins at the White Cube, Bermondsey, were created in 2023. Standing before these paintings, what strikes is the vigour, the energy of the strokes, the resonance of colour and composition, the thrill of life. Born into ‘a destroyed order, a destroyed landscape, a destroyed people, a destroyed society’, Baselitz has found meaning in making. And, it is a meaningful experience to spend time with these paintings. What does it all mean though? These paintings of upside down deer and birds, of people and stockings. What are they about? I don’t know. I don’t know and I don’t want to know. Meaning is for other things. Or is it? 'Ideas are not art '- Robert Adams  Longmont, Colorado (1979) Robert Adams The tendency for contemporary artists, and indeed galleries with their labelling, to bind themselves to a socio-cultural position seems to suggest otherwise. So many times of late, I've tried to avoid the explanatory spiel positioning work in an ideology or offering a salve to the offence that may or may not be caused A worrying position if you believe art, in whatever form, is eviscerated when it seeks to be argument. Jed Perl’s, Authority and Freedom, a brief poking at the idea, is well worth a read if you are interested in such things. As is the elegant prose of American photographer, Robert Adams, in his two slim books, Art Can Help and Beauty in Photography. Where the prose takes him sometimes is a tad too conservative but there are some cracking lines trailing tantalising ideas. My time looking at paintings, reading and writing, going to the theatre and listening to music, is not a search for a subject and what is thought about it, but for a moment that stirs the soul. For wonder. For delight. For playing in the playground that throbs between me and the artwork. It is, more than anything, to feel alive. Is that an outmoded romanticising? Maybe. But who doesn’t want to feel more alive in an increasingly deadening world. The reductionist, I know a few, comes away from a painting telling you what it’s about. I’ve never seen a painting about anything. What matters is the how not the what; the exquisite and unique way that a work is made, not that some message will be revealed. Be it in the theatre or in the folds of a page, what holds you is the telling not what's told. I’m nowhere near as prolific as Baselitz yet I carry on making work. Today, I’m celebrating another year of a poem a day. I started on the 28th May 2022 and now have 732 daily poems. I’m not sure how much longer I’ll keep going, but for the last two years I’ve started the day with a cup of coffee and some scribbling. A playing. What they’re about who knows, but I’m sharing a few for a journeying through. I hope you can dance in the playground...  Who's there? (2021) Rachel Clare X After reading Rachel Aviv on Lucy Letby His eyes follow her and an idea swells in his sighting of her skin she stands by newborn’s fragile breath her hands are delicate, hurt does not throb in tender fingertips but he replaces her with an x and bundles the certain blanket of statistics over her exhausted frame he rushes on a stream of theories beckoning others to follow him bundling strange obstacles out of his way tearing at the snags of uncertainty & tossing them into forgotten depths she is broken by the angel of death whose dark feathered wings flap on the solid gust of conviction her history is snapped into puzzle pieces pressed to a rough picture of shrivelled kindness coincidence is too cruel to be swallowed so mystery is choked, stance cloaked as the doors of hell are opened she sits at a table scrawling thoughts too fierce to bear, these will be straightened by the strong arm of the law to paper’s bold typeface her lonely shaking at the kitchen table unseen as everyone takes turns shaping a killer Monday 27th May '24  Poundland, Blackpool (2019) Johnny Durham Poundland Poundland has a problem & it’s not even ten o’clock early ransackers are caught in an anxious queue, feet shifting to a symphony of impatience heads swivelling in search of some release from low lit agony as the machines malfunction & only accept the disappearing currency, cash, half-heartedly signalled by the hand written sign sellotaped to the machines forehead I find a note & make a play for the front waving my tenner like some signal of surrender I listen to the loveless bleep as I scan my two pads & wrong sized batteries for a clock that has lost its face & energy indexing my way through images prefacing escape, I press the one still sporting the dead queen’s face her response is to tell me to enter my PIN, technology’s joke taken, I slide the ten pound note into the illuminated lips swallowed, nothing happens the screen is unmoved & knowing this is Poundland my prejudice sets itself to the panic of loss I look for some rescuing, for the return of fortune’s favour the queue’s exasperated eyes tell me to accept my loss & get the hell out of there before they launch an avalanche of biscuits & batteries at my obstructing head a woman in the dark blue of uniformity lumbers from till to my side It’s cash only she grumbles I want to tell her I stuck my finger in the queen’s face but I mumble It gobbled up my tenner. I pressed the cash sign her weary eyes won’t hide her irritation & disbelief but she has a half served stewing customer to return to her fingers dance over the screen & a five pound note is spat out for me to grab I push through the glass door breathe in September morning sun & see that my unlocked bike stands there still & perhaps today will hold some promise Thursday 21st September '23  Fly with Aerocene Pacha After Saraceno's film at the Serpentine Galery to levitate without any violence to the earth - Tomás Saraceno An army of white shirted men lift their heads to godly dreams reckless roaming beyond their allotted sphere, conquistadores countdown to a future that burns and rots, power thrums beneath the nylon rippling with Promethean muscle, lift off launching trail has licked our land dry, slakeless tongue blind vision, merciless heart, the future is theirs the forgotten walk on the white of the salt flats native crust from which they have lived, prospered, played billowing hope hangs in the black shapes lifting beyond their fragile grasp, water is life, salt is life, life is… it cannot be battery powered, love dwindles in lithium’s extraction Salinas Grandes, a salty battleground, people of the earth together standing against the sea of green greed they follow faith watching her human feet lift, black shoes swaying over pure land there is no fire here, nature’s bounty can carry us beneath Icarus’s reach, beauty holds in simple things, silent wonder Thursday 13th July '23  The Drunkards (1883) James Ensor A pint of bitter in Milton Keynes Behind the plate glass men sit with their eleven o’clock pints no eyes or heart for the world beyond stooped shoulders take their mouths to the next gulp, something to soothe the static crackle of disappointment one lifts his looking from lagered lethe and stares straight into my curious gaze an unexpected beam shone onto his suffering his solitude is scratched, doused anger dried the hurt still breathing from other days rises to a seething that he sends my way I hurry on, climbing Midsummer Boulevard my look driven downwards to avoid breaking the shell of another’s torment, a bitter spilling Friday 23rd February '24  What shall we do? After reading Andrew Scull's Desperate Remedies Madness wears many masks one crooked grin papered over dribbling lips gaping to swallow the black sadness of a shoulder shrugging world tender mercies sink beneath a stripped collarbone, raw cries electrocuted into bleeding ecstasy straitjacketed symphony to the schooled ears of the alienists lunacy lives in the moon, a white land where doctors cannot crawl so they stand tall on degenerate dogma wagging their tongues to the whip of new ideas, the clink of coin the quack’s rattle a soporific song to keep the distressed dependent on an angel’s soft delivery of cereal keep your bowels clean, crunch on the cornflakes, you will be saved Monday 1st January '24  Forgetting oneself After Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days What delight can be found leaking from the stains of drudgery a shattered soul pieced together to shape a sturdy tree dark eyes and camera lifting to the leaf filled light he has found beauty in the cradling of his own soul dignity is drafted in the detail of his attention he belongs to the brotherhood of the broken, heart crushed companions who fall into intimate wonder with ears, with trees, with the darkness of two shadows dancing death’s footsteps in the distance sealed agony presses his lips a trembling smile harbours tears there are no perfect days but he will play the tape and sing Monday 18th March '24  Buster Keaton on the phone Cold Calling The phone rings, it rings, the phone & I do, I do what anyone would do I pick it up, the phone that rings & it stops ringing, I listen listen to the voice automated & errant this voice which isn’t a voice, tells me I am under attack, have been attacked, not like someone breaking into my house with a hammer & breaking open my skull but it’s a hammer blow all the same thirteen hundred pounds has been siphoned, snatched seized from my account, the voice which isn’t a voice doesn’t say that not exactly being automated it isn’t interested in words, the repeating s for effect, ill or lulling the listener I am not lulled but I am offered two options, press one to cancel the transaction which I haven’t transacted or two to speak to someone less automated than the automated voice which has reported in its automated way this grand larceny I remember when the ringing phone stopped ringing & the automated voice first spoke if that’s what automated voices do he, it, it, didn’t mention a bank no proper noun was offered to accompany the tale of my money’s taking thirteen hundred pounds richer it hadn’t been lifted I hadn’t lost I had been lied to this was a scam I smiled & pressed 2 there was a click a click that felt if clicks can feel that it was coming from some far off place the other side of decency but it was human the voice when it spoke which it did I’m not usually an interrupter, I listen listen to what the other person has to say & this was a person but I had listened too long to something less human & I didn’t mention it but my coffee was getting cold so I interrupted this man from very far away & asked him where he was from Your mother’s pussy he roared before there was another click then silence I put the phone that had stopped ringing, & speaking both as a machine & as a man back into it’s cradle & I picked up my coffee & thought I thought that’s no way to speak to your brother Friday 3rd November '23  Bedroom Interior with Water jug and Bowl on Table (1933) Walker Evans Making my mum’s bed We follow a mapped voice to find sheets for our mum’s bed three of them, smiles enlightening their faces, greet us inside this emporium of pillows, coverlets & feathered rest we shift from the pure white cotton to a colour’s hiding black seems best to stifle the body’s relinquishing we question luxury’s leaning, whether duck or goose will slide her towards some last moment of joy sad knowing takes over & we settle for a synthetic mix comfort enough for a life curdled in indifference we stop for underwear, you disappear into malled maze I wait, blasting music from hire car’s speaker, to beat away melancholy's grip, you search for size & holding to bear her bloating little white daises flood the dress you bought her in different frame she could be child again, not now hunch, hurt, ballooning & shuffle are body’s mockery we sit beneath bruised clouds, momentary spurts of hot sun warm echo of other days we have sat in this restaurant her laughter & remembered life is teased from shadowed solitude time has tied her in confusion’s gag, eyes swivelling to make sense of what is said, silent breath the only accompaniment to the slow chewing of small lamb chops lying cold on her plate bed is her only comfort, I help my mum down to its holding cover her in the new sheets she does not notice, sense lessening this soft shrouding in darkness, the fragile white flowers vanish Friday 9th June '23 |