Matters of the Art

I could bury my questions under mounds of earth,
Practicalities aside
Answers burning in lost concepts

From tin hats you choose, irregular piece of sky
Simplicity, unfounded
Played once more with clouds

Modernity matters only in the now
Time signatures
Art is a fly dancing round areola

Place pieces of sky on white chess board
Filch umbrella
Kiss you through the silences.

Conversations on Sand (from Quarkboy)

I have no hypothesis
For the origins of mass
Though life may just be
The multiplication of cell division
Over the will to live.

We ponder the shape of the universe
Saddle,
Coned,
Reverse Cowgirl.
Thrash out proposed constants
Explode our theories
Discuss the malleability of
Soul
Damn it all to heaven.

We sought desolation in beauty and
Beauty in desolation

You remind me of the time of singularity
When air flowed freely
And our lives complied with all the known laws.
I remind you of a time when you sang pretty songs
To the ‘candyman’
Traded your faith for trumpets and trinkets
An early compromise
Before we could understand
‘Visceral’

So bury the dead under driftwood
Tie it off with bladderack
Leave it to the tides.

A piece of Byron died on these sands
He sang of dead dogs and shipwrecks

This is no place for resurrections.

Peruvian Etchings on Seaham Beach (For Jeremy Kyle)

This pebble?
This silt?
This mouth?
What passes for time?

Stealing snow from my hood?
Sanding down driftwood?
Etching?
Scratching?
Clawing?

Meer Kat eyes out to sea
Unrelated particles
Reacting to an unseen resonance
Isobars in neutrality
Ignorant of longitude
Lateral of notion.

Gulls cry like babies.
Hands scrape shapes
Some Nazca/Palpa reference
Like us
Lost civilization
Found next time round
In the scrapings of a trowel.

What passes for time?
This mouth?
This silt?
This pebble?




James Oates 8/9-12-08

Since When?

In the tremor of a blink
The iris dips
And alters hue
It dawns
That everything that once was
Even when it wasn't was
Wasn't what it once was
Homogeny is not my blueprint
Forgiveness
Not your design.