Tuesday, August 02, 2005

Making hats out of blue play-dough...

'I grow a bit tired of the terrestrial stuff
And the celestial nonsense
Swill and guzzle and copulate and copulate and
guzzle and swill until you break up like a jigsaw puzzle
Shattered with smiling.'
George Barker

I'm reading 'Hockney's Alphabet'. It's got all the letters of the alphabet drawn by David Hockney, and there is a text for each letter by a different writer. Here's an instance:

S by Ted Hughes

Started an eel
Of strangest flesh
Nor snake nor fish
So sheer to feel
So live, so lithe
As when she slid
Out of her hole
In purest soul

On a spiral. Corkscrewed into a shock of nostril, the sneeze of glair. Squirmed flex and reflex into saliva. The slug of speech, she lubricates the shapes of air. L'onde s'enfle dessous. Sashays across the surges of perspective. Swan of vision, she shakes light bare. Singular sex of plural and the supplest of strange tails. Thirsts for her ghost keenest, the ice's wound. Sound-waves abandoned the Lusitania. Depth-charged, a sea-wprm, struggling, surfaced, stares and there

In a lens of ocean
Where happiness doubles
Opening the purse
Of lips for a kiss
With a human sigh
The wordless eye
Of end and beginning
Rears its hiss.

This is my favourite. There's 'Y by Douglas Adams' and 'An elegy for X by Anthony Burgess'.....but I love this one for its floaty feel.

And now...a confession. The reason I've hidden behind the words of others is because I had none of my own. Thanks to R.Raj Rao, I now inhabit a free-prison for writers. Every line I write brings uncertainty. And discovery.
I like paper burnt around the edges. And paper that is artfully torn but still looks carelessly ripped.

I love you

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

really liked the last poem kind of touches the soul