This Instant - Dedicated to Ellen Salter

-

  This instant

 

This instant she is

Craning her neck

Sight reading the starlings on the aerial

She fears the sound of

The ceramic glazed lustre

A side dish of olive stones

Exploding into the cosmic

Void of the walk-in kiln

Does the light go on?

The bulb above your head

Does the penny drop?

The dripping alchemy

Of this stickle brick universe

Is somehow all wrong

An inverted syrup

Am I losing my hair?

 

Come here this instant

Your escape velocity 

Is terminal four

The quick sand conveyor belt

Is up to your neck in it

Squelch went the dying sun

She says sticking a finger in her cheek

A plastic spade blade gamely

Patting the top of the old block

Plastic flag at the ready

Seagulls whirl and crow

Expounding obvious pride in

The I told you so of it

The that which every mother knows

The new dog old tricks

Pavlov’s bell ringing certainty of it

Of it all of it all of it all

 

this instant instantly explodes

a highly improbable moment

 

then this one then the next

and then this one then the next

 

witness the tick tock clickety creak

of your best domino arrangement

 

snaking off into the single point

horizon of a vista waiting 

 

to be packed away

as Dawn descends

 

everyone likes to get the toys out

but non like to put them away

 

instead you wait behind a privet hedge

and pack away with the others they have

 

run past in their vest and pants best

inching up their passages.

 

 

This instant is now over

This instant has now ended

 

But this instant is all yours

In the back of your mind

 

If you have the time or inclination

My grandmother touched this instant

 

In service on her way between 

the kitchen and the dining room

 

After her spell in the work-house 

having been orphaned

 

She touched its barley sugar twirl

For good luck brushed

 

Its mahogany cough candy patina

This instant she thought

 

Imagining a camera looking

Down on her sallow complexion

 

And smiling resignedly into the future

A present from the ether

 

My arrival 

this instant

 

 

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

COSMIKNOT > nomadic freedoms of the LyrriK Voyce

-
Image
the solution is a bassline and an ancient future outlook. Onward to p.e.a.c.e. Platforms Athens CosmiKnot spins the vestiges of the fake problem into duct tape fixing a funeral barge sailing to the moon with the precision of a tru throw away note trailing from the crumpled horn of 1/4 million miles Davis   Curated by Dr Mikey Georgeson and Samuel Zealey   30th March - 15th April AVA, UEL, E16 2RD A collective speculative temporary community. Re-enchanting the region of disenchantment through the shifting myth-concepts of Aesthetic Ontology.   CosmiKnot is a space to gather in community as social unit to understand through the speculative ritual of Perforum We selected artists with conviction in weaving specific contingent personal mythology into shifting performative ritual transformation of encounter with a materially vital entity that speaks back.   My-Key Hassan Aliyu, Yasmeen Ally El Araby, Bry Ford, Caroline Gregory, My-key, Isabell Metsäpelto, Tony Moon, Veneti...
Read more

Football dads

-
  I have become a football dad. Okay I was already one last season but that was football-dad-lite and came free. For a start it was, whisper it, a church league. There was always a prayer before kick off and one of the hazards was a certain coach who seemed to enjoy asking me, in a Columbo style line of questioning, to remind him which church we went to. My son’s team, despite being an overspill squad, won the league in what turned out to be a nail biting close to the season. This season he is playing for an eleven a side team and I am suddenly one of the squad drivers. Last week in the car park one of the boys remarked on the soft suspension and I became aware of just how low I had let the tyre pressure get. Now coming from a family of panickers I always get a sinking feeling when confronted with something as simple as a flat tyre. It feels like fate has caught up with me and has decided to show me I was never meant to be a vehicle owner (Our family panicking is well founded and n...
Read more

Tales from the village

-
Image
The village people gathered round and they asked him to tell them about how they might come to accept change more readily and so he told them a story.  One drizzly winter morning, the kind when the rain can hardly seemed bothered to make anything wet, a local university lecturer was preparing to leave his house with his two young sons, who were playing in the walled garden at the front of the house. The garden was leafy all year round and the man was proud that he had planted the deciduous shrubs himself. Suddenly he heard the raised tinkling voices of his children coming from outside and hurried to find out what the cause of their excitement was. The boys were in good humour but it seemed that one of the household's two tortoiseshell cats had somehow perched itself on the handlebars of the elder sons bicycle when it took its morning crap. In their endeavours to avoid the excrement the two sons had haphazardly engineered to spread small portions of it about their attire. Ther...
Read more