Written for my dear friend and collaborator Magnus Arrevad.
There’s fun to be had in painting…
On a canvas of cities and flesh,
While a striptease of theatre curtains
Opens to reveal no stage, no actor
And (look!) no curtain, while unerringly
A story dreams itself into being,
Whose moustache-stroking subject declares:
“There’s plenty of time left for painting.
What this world needs is acrobats
Forming fearless figures – a grand somersault
Towards the bloody rush of impermanence!”
His audience, pretending they’re there,
Bear gamely the roles they perform:
Infidelity’s spectres (moaning!),
Whinging prostitutes of every order,
And bored, bald kings of France inferred
From chequebooks, bloody baited hooks,
Good patrons with lilts to their words:
“There’s plenty of time left for painting.
What this world needs is dancers’
Adolescent spines – we love the arcs
That can bend to what passions our passions might ask.”
Defined tasks, marking nothing in glitter,
Glittering obsequies’ smiles
Bind themselves (yes, okay then, in ‘not’s),
Bon mots serve; all serve, but what?
That hot iron prison that pretended it isn’t…
It isn’t! It wasn’t. No parade of contrition
Is needed, nor able to resurrect its effects.
It’s black and it’s bloody, friend, it’s wet in this place,
But in substance is close to the real as we get.
And so we pull paint from the veins of the sky
Dabbing light on a canvas of cities and flesh.
