To be a canvas 

Out to dry, my skin peeling,

I stare into an endless black, 

where no one sees or speaks. 

Am I invisible? 

Above, you move, gently brushing the surface, 

caressing, enough to tickle. But it stabs, 

a malicious incision that causes agony 

to prevail. My blood seeps over,  

in red, but also black, and white, and blue, 

until I’m covered. A pastiche of your desires. 

I savour the last stroke, ingrain its scratch 

and its pressure. You turn.  

Don’t.  

Am I something easily left? 

No relief, trapped within my wooden box.

Hundreds of eyes passing over me, scrutinising,

with dismission on their lips.

They aren’t you. 

MUTT

That’s your favourite kind of dog.

I know this because you declare it everytime you see one. The whippet-a snippet into the life we’ll live together under our roof for three; you and whippet and me, bundled together like parents and their child. We won’t sleep, we’ll stare at our beast while it snoozes and lazes and snores and dozes, marinating in its own warmth.

One day, when we have a dog, I hope it’ll be like this one

Dance to the music of time

(One thousand years, one turning hand)

Art is a name

Discovered (via consequence)

In work.

I give you the 20th century

(As if it were a myth)

In “Picasso.”

Your name, Du Fu,

Found expression as 少陵野老

After much

Hardship and movement.

These days, we call outwards to you…

“Saint of poetry.”

No part of my analysis

Will disagree with the ethic of your title. 

What I wish to offer is suggestive

Of your identity in time.

On this, you wrote

五十年间似反掌

Which, in loose vernacular,

Makes visible fifty years

In a turning hand.

The reflection developed from the sight

Of a sword dance, the specific twist of steel

Locked to the orbit of her body – its magnetism.

[What good are these scientific terms

Compared to the evidence

Of an open eye?]

Like an unborn novelist, it is fragrance,

In space, you noticed (and the pain

Of diffusion when you gasp for air).

If this was linear, a film strip,

I would cut to the present

(Hoping the image preserves in the retina).

Behind a glass display: Tang dynasty dancers,

With the curve of an arrow on a stopwatch,

Stand and observe

The television screen

Of many bodies moving.

This is how your poetry moves me.

Nothing ever happens here

Nothing ever happens here

(Unfinished Bacon)

I.

Incomplete

As male chromosome –

(Like a tumour)

Life was swollen.

The tear, at the corner,

– Surgical –

Saves the palate, balanced,

From the canvas.

Cubism: an obscenity –

The naïve geometry 

Can no longer

Bear further Renaissance.

Art is naturally premature

[Post line, post form].

II.

Carpets of primary colour

Fight one another,

Throw the nuance of flesh

Into relief –

Not even the revered (i.e. The Patron)

Exempt from bloodied nose

That comes from the pressing

Of faces into frames.

Bacon’s Vincent:

A portrait of an ear, not a man.

(And the foliage that surrounds

Hiding the Tiger and Gauguin).

Now, naked,

Diffuse in dark. [You really can].

Dance to the music of time

(One thousand years, one turning hand)

Art is a name

Discovered (via consequence)

In work.

I give you the 20th century

(As if it were a myth)

In “Picasso.”

Your name, Du Fu,

Found expression as 少陵野老

After much

Hardship and movement.

These days, we call outwards to you…

“Saint of poetry.”

No part of my analysis

Will disagree with the ethic of your title. 

What I wish to offer is suggestive

Of your identity in time.

On this, you wrote

五十年间似反掌

Which, in loose vernacular,

Makes visible fifty years

In a turning hand.

The reflection developed from the sight

Of a sword dance, the specific twist of steel

Locked to the orbit of her body – its magnetism.

[What good are these scientific terms

Compared to the evidence

Of an open eye?]

Like an unborn novelist, it is fragrance,

In space, you noticed (and the pain

Of diffusion when you gasp for air).

If this was linear, a film strip,

I would cut to the present

(Hoping the image preserves in the retina).

Behind a glass display: Tang dynasty dancers,

With the curve of an arrow on a stopwatch,

Stand and observe

The television screen

Of many bodies moving.

This is how your poetry moves me.

Amedeo Modigliani 1884 – 1920 

(Portrait of Anna Zborowska c.1918-1919)

Eye frets, are careful –

Ought not to read

Subtitles.

(Their announcement

Makes generic

A tragedy).

Modigliani: I hate 

This language,

Non-specific,

And the Romantic

Notion that art, like intent,

Is perspective.

Instead of bodies,

Hunched in photographs,

Shattered like glass –

What it is to adore form as content!

[Your line,

A single hair].

Not rhetorical

‘Can we all stop killing each other?’ An influencer lounges on a leather couch talking to a phone bought with blood money. I swipe past. 

‘Can we all stop killing each other?’ My friends sigh this out every Monday morning. I murmer in agreement and keep walking.

‘Can we all stop killing each other?’ A reporter asks rhetorically. Her interviewee begins a monologue on how that can’t be. I turn off the news.

‘Can we all stop killing each other?’ A genocide victim pleads, talking to a void of helpless. I finish my dinner.

‘Can we all stop killing each other?’ is written on a billboard in the museum. I see the words behind my eyelids as I sleep.              

                                                                                                            

Penddelwlechi (Slate Bust) Re-Draft:

Slate faced man

Wonder from whence you came

Not the house hat tiles

In the middle of your lifespan

(Of which you were broken, stolen

Left dirtied- then- made fame)

But the endless grey piles

On the old mountain 

Mythically abandoned 

Wonder while you can

Slate faced man

Do you go back

To where we both began.                                             

King Lear:

The painted figure stands tall and still, his dark face stretched across the canvas. A difficult expression to read, anger, sorrow, exhaustion. His green crown being the centre shaped like a city, with pointed towers that like the spires of a church. Showing this burden that may be too heavy for him to bear. A pale and textured background, designed with various layered strokes of white and grey. It feels as though this is to give the figure a standout.

His skin painted with deep brown tones, gives the painting that warmth it loses through the cold background.

This version of King Lear does not represent a traditional British king. He looks ragged and worn down. Ribero turns the Shakespeare tragic ruler into something new, where it shows the struggles that come with being a ruler. The crown suggests the power he has as well as a burden.

A reminder of how authority and identity can weigh on a person, when looking through a different lens.

Degrelegy

“Degrelegy” is a poem about a med-school student called Sasha, who sees the Sainsbury Centre as a refuge from the pressures of academic life, a space where art allows for self-expression and reflection.

Sasha stands in the exhibition aisle, 

plucking the lashes out of the papyrus

Pregnant with the luciferic motives 

that derail a stained coat of arms

Her face, coated in circuit wax, 

turned in black towards the Renaissance.

All autumn, late-term and glittered 

in iced Americano cubes, 

Thinking about the garden 

where the essays grow as carnivorous plants,

between the doctoral buffalo 

and gluttonous med-school students. 

In the class of pillowed thuribles, 

wishing to be elsewhere,

 to skip down a row of fated frames,

it made her spinal fingers shake celibate at the altar of academic libido.

Though no impulse to breed the bullets 

at the compulsory module bereaves 

the summative bladder.

Her hypothalamus isn’t there, 

see it in glass beside Giacometti

as the black marker prescribes the ladder.

She glares and throws the teacher 

to the helm of her operating theatre, 

Rows of scholars sit steady, 

woven neatly of suited exhibit space, 

Their pen in hand for the beheaded portrait, 

with a curriculum of spines stuffed in a suitcase.

Still Sasha, over there, 

performing transplants between smoke

-breaks, 

before the lecturer,

injected by the atrium, 

withdrawn from the master works,  

wanting nothing more than a bright white space 

to quietly observe the work of the mad children.

Upon the mezzanine, sculpture-scoped visions

of the honorary degrees, she saw them 

in flesh on the walls like the soup aisle in Salem.

And there, she thought, it all grows away in the milk-land of painting. 

So Sasha stands to the dust, 

learns about loaned-out lungs, 

then proclaims that she knows too little 

to know too much, 

so before she one day wonders 

why the empty skull suppers 

redacted her livelihood in a magnetic wave, 

she puts her nose in the spine of exhibitory powder 

and thinks up a scalpel-tinged 

organ of teaching 

to rearrange.

Image Credit: Marie Anna Lee