slide down them,
go headfirst
and flat
on your stomachs,
thumping surfboards
riding
on blunt waves
of tread, riser and nosing—
it doesn’t matter,
never has,
if they are carpeted
or bare-board
or fire escapes—
hammer at them
with your arses,
rodeo,
bucking bronco,
hiccupping,
falsetto—
if you must,
and you will have to,
go up them, upstairs,
as geckos might,
as birds with broken wings
must (with ramshackle tics
and flurries) or climb
like you’ve hundredweight
boots on your feet
(mountainous
trudging) or do
the rodeo/bronco thing
backwards,
reverse cowgirl (cowboy)
(cow-genderless [an aside—
sex seems to complicate stuff,
yet no stuff is ever sexless—
discuss in 20 objects or less]
[or more], more or less )—
but never shy
or undermine
the splendour
of the normal,
walk up or walk down them,
stairs are process
(of getting somewhere)
(above or below)—
pause midway,
sit, grandstand,
in suspense,
in between a here and a there,
stare (sightless
with thought)(thoughtful
with sight), spying
through the bannisters
or sandwiched by walls
(reassuring, cool
against your cheek),
halfway (present),
pivotal to past/to the future
(you fulcrums) playful
with being
as children.
most of it
let slide—
for it never,
not ever,
not really,
never certainly,
slips away
from you—
once thought,
it resides
(made real,
a something),
retrievable.
thought of/about
(head-spoken)
(or said out loud),
it ghosts,
comes back
to knock
and to rattle
around you—
most often
it’s an unwanted
haunting (you might
[not that you should]
devise a form
of exorcism—
some ceremonial mode
of critical self-appraisal
[say boo to a goose]—
note: self-abuse
is another fellow’s
lovemaking (the art world
like the whole world—
you already know—is
lively with wankers (
mutual masturbators),
but art is a peepshow—
so what can you do?)
slide—the playground slide
challenges you to climb it
(doesn’t it)(must have once,
even if it doesn’t now
that you’re so mature)
(you remember
the running on the spot
of your ascent)(the faintest
grip of plimsoles
on highly polished steel,
the little nubs of surefooted-ness
that assisted in your conquest
of that fleet slant sheet)—
stuff gets done—
stuff gets done—
life is all accomplishment
(the abandonment
of the abandon of sleep,
the getting to all those
necessities of surely unnecessary place,
holding your head up/in your hands/straight,
etcetera)—living is an achievement—
if art and life are one,
you can’t lose,
you’ve won
[erm. worst rhyming ever.
but i let it slide.
it’s more of a Casper
than a poltergeist—
the second worst rhyming ever].
let it slide.
let it be.
the minute yawn of a pore in the skin of something
is there to be filled. the scruff bank that shoulders or corridors
a rail track is barely occupied by the daydreams of passengers
and fly-tipped stuff and wild flowers-and-grasses. the margins
of any text (a text of urban/suburban/commercial/rural
architectural sprawl/upheaval/splendour, the text of a love affair,
the text of a politician’s open mouth, of a slug’s slick passage
along a pavement, of the trees beating against trees on trees
in the mosh pit of a high wind) are vacancies. all space
is headspace. we blow space like bubblegum into balloons
of encompassing with our breathing. space isn’t ever
in short supply—it will seem it is—the whole concrete
otherness of all that’s out there will close-in and it will
make you feel tightly (screw tightly) confined—there are
no restrictions, no lack of room (stuff abides wherever),
there’s no diminishment you cannot jemmy open.
space is what you’ve got. it’s between your ears. throughout
your fingers. where your eyes live, live out, even in the dark.
(darkness is one of the vast realms you can travel)(undoing
is another—undoing— taking an eraser to something,
putting right a wrong, or unpicking, or undressing.)
there is play in everything and everywhere—fulfill it,
occupy it, leave it empty with a sign in its window reading
‘vacancy’. space is what there is and what can be done.
what is and what will be. space—the final frontier,
jeux sans frontières. [stair / slide / space]