I don’t want the trance,
trailed in window-breath mist.
I want to grab nettles,
wild foliage,
dirt.
Where beauty is focused,
emphatically sharpened,
as thorns draw their quills
through the sleeves of my shirt.
I seek
your sensational touch,
inspirational love,
a connection with echoes of art.
I’m drifting, I’m muddily shifting,
unkissed here,
alone
at the base of the cliff where we part.
Clutching at gems
on an ice-stormed rock,
I’m lost in their glacial reflection.
My toes
touching sharp-buried stones
in the surf,
salt stinging
my skin’s every pained imperfection.
Fevered, I see you,
smiling, a siren,
approaching, gaze-locked.
Insurrection!
I feel fading tracery,
nails on my flesh:
the marks of your affection.
THIS IS AFFECTED BY the long shadow of novelist Kathy Acker, who I read enthusiastically many years ago.
In this poem, there’s some echo of her focus on the bloody, pointed things of the world, and for me her style never fully dimmed. I was once surprised to find myself sat one table away from Kathy in my go-to pasta restaurant, as she was talking at New York volume, lunching with music journalist Charles Shaar Murray. Soho was like that. At another restaurant in the same postcode, I sat one table away from polymath and public-intellectual Bernard Levin as he munched on his chicken, and then close to Leicester Square I was one table away from film director Julien Temple discussing movie-funding with his producer, Stephen Woolley. In a theatre foyer, I stood next to Alan Rickman (shorter off), and later at the bar with Jeremy Irons (also shorter off).
In London I felt like I was perpetually a few steps from the spotlight, earwigging. Out here in the hinterlands, not so much. Although I once bumped into Dad’s Army’s Arthur Lowe in a country house hotel.
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Illustration: “The Icebergs”, Frederic Edwin Church, 1861
Thanks for the clues on the inspiration for the piece, Ian. I enjoyed how it wandered all over to various pain-points, if not pain, then at least interactions with reality that scratched and scraped and bumped and pricked...and how that was all associated with relationships. This walk doesn't seem like it was meant to be entirely comfortable.