Early in life I discovered
Literary lions were jackals
Simply digging up old bones
Dining out on carcasses
Never in present time
Now no-one is prepared
To be ‘collateral damage’ for The Arts
They must devour their own home-grown
Hyena steak or two-faced snake
Art pretends partition
Imaginary islands
Offshore havens safe from moral law
There if a sick man vomits in your shoe
This might not be preventable
But if in his delirium
He is convinced all things his vomitoria
That is failure of reason –
Reason follows only natural law
That is why my meditations
Are never novels plays nor purple prose –
If Mr Saint insists
I am the world’s great elegiac poet
That is entirely his affair
The reliably unreliable narrator.
Bernard Saint
Montage: Claire Palmer
.