These expressions are straight out of Goya,
he said. Nobody wants to climb six floors,
never mind twenty, but narrative is not the
only story & when play resumes we need to
regain our focus. What is sleep like for some-
one who has eyes without eyelids?
I once had an English teacher called Merkelian,
she said, but I thought it was Magellan. We’ve
been watching these Coelacanth for hours, &
they’ve hardly moved a fin, he said. It’s a gift of
geography but a life in the shadows is the norm
& here is the safest place to be.
Colosseum or Procol Harum? The missiles struck
in the middle of the morning when the school
was full of children. Not all diaries look the same
but you need to remember to wash your hands
after handling raw fish, he said. Leon Rosselson
or Billy Bragg? Whose version do you prefer?
It’s The World Turned Upside Down, she said.
Spicy tuna rolls or egg mayonnaise sandwiches?
A major quake is due around the area of the San
Andreas Fault but the sea is a field of primal
encounter & we need to get off the bus. Are you
daydreaming again, she said.
I’m sure there is more to this than suppressed
trauma but we are working at a high level of
abstraction & either way we are history. An area
of low pressure will bring unsettled weather today
but we are also in for a heatwave. There’s something
in the aphorism that nature abhors a vacuum, he said.
Tonight, we are looking at caterpillars that glow
in the dark. Am I the only one here with any grasp
on reality? Having tasted power, we are not content
to share it but we all present an image to the world,
he said. She may be a megalomaniac but she’s posing
as a narcissist, almost obsessively, you might say.
.
Steve Spence
.