Is this poetry or prose?
More to the point, will it win me some money? I want to buy myself the odd Christmas present. And Tiff. And Bel, as a thankyou for all those lovely little films.
Ecological disaster (listen here)
I find it after six months have passed, when I decide to take down the last of her pencil drawings, underneath which is another one, taped up on the wall in her neat way. Oh my god. There, superimposed on one of the dozens of sketches she drew of the outside of me is a drawing of the inside of me. After everything that failed to happen, after everything that didn’t get said. She has invented – I say invented because she hasn’t a clue what my inside is like – an unscientific sort of network of veins in pink, blue and lime green. Not my colours at all but then she doesn’t know what’s really in there; she never studied me well enough to know what my colours or tastes are and she never asked. So those colours are wrong. The network of veins she has drawn inside me is as flimsy and delicate as a spider’s web whereas CJ’s depiction of the inside of me is more towards the boldness of the London Underground map because CJ thinks that’s how I function, all Broadway Boogie Woogie, but again, all those bright bold colours are wrong. And the edges ought to blur out, but CJ is far too anal retentive to let that happen. Perhaps I should be flattered that she perceived this sensitive-looking lacy fragility inside me. I evidently came across to her as complicated. If John on the other hand were to draw my insides he would draw a concrete network of motorways like Spaghetti Junction along which steam-rollers trundle, along which bulldozers bulldoze. A messy grey scribble with no flair or subtlety, the lack of which is no reflection on me but rather speaks volumes about John, who is not an artist but a plumber who can only visualise basic pipe systems. He would build me in Meccano alright but that’s as far as it could ever go. Black canals is me. That stagnant network that joins up post-industrial cities. I am dark arteries. The black worms of my veins spewing out indelible ink when cut open. Ironically it is John who has a bit of insight into the sluggish passage of liquid along channels, who has the practical skills to steer along these waterways. The time I got cut by one of the above (I’ll leave you to puzzle it out – not John, obviously) was more devastating than today’s oil-spill which has already obliterated the sea-life of a whole ocean and the bird-life of half a continent, the full ramifications of which we cannot yet even guess at. [now published in KUNST]
[subscribe2]