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Poems from the May Bonus Track

The Gallery After Closing Time

Night time when the corridors are dry,
the halls echoing empty spaces,
whispering the footfalls of crowded Sunday afternoons.
The hush of rooms stripped of their visitors,
just our painted eyes glinting in the shadow light.
We stare into the quiet of night's palet,
the dark hush of colours resting
from the harshness of so many gazes.

Goodnight Vincent

Vincent,
your cocky chair nearly had us,
almost a dare rather than an invitation.
You skew perspective,
pitch that hard clay floor into our faces
and yet those roots reach out
from the box of onions,
prove that the truth, the will,
cannot be contained.

A blunt offer, yet still an invitation,
Please be seated, minus the please.
We reciprocate with a bi-millenial
money tainted gaze,
scanning for some em o-porn
omens of tragedy rumbling beneath
thick smears of beaming yellow.

Perhaps it is more fitting
that when the floor no longer squeaks
with the gate of rubber soles,
after the day's last echoing whisper
signifies the constant failure of words...

Lights out.
Photons cease their frantic dance
with no retinal rods to catch them.
I like to think that your invitation still stands
though it is the silence, the stillness, the darkness
That accept it.

Impression

The reflection of a painting,
my back turned.
Doors within doors, stepping into a room
like talking to the sun.
The woman with the parrot on her shoulder,
these faces you taught me to read.

What you can see in the swirls of white,
a colour is more than just a colour.
To capture the shadows of light
is to avoid crashing on the rocks.
Climbing the spiral staircase,
I remember how to dance on the ceiling.

I stare into the garden,
the greens whispering to me
it will be all right.
Even after the paint has peeled from the walls,
even after you are just a space,
an absence marked only by a lighter shade of blue.

What has been covered
is the ghost of a portrait.
All the stories in the water lilies.
I drink their echoes
as you tell me about cornfields and heartbreak.
It's written in the wildness of their eyes,
a mirror smashed into life.

Nocturne

If you drink a painting for long enough, you can breathe it into life.
Will this be enough to save the white cockatee
from the cruelty of this nocturnal experiment?
As the oxygen is sucked from the pump,
the children turn their faces away.
But the lovers don't care, they roam through the gallery halls,
oblivious to anyone but themselves.
The heat of their ghosts passing lights up each room.
The scientist stares out at the wonders of the future.
His swirling clouds of death foreshadow the splitting of the atom
as the white bird bashes her wings against the glass.
Only after closing time does she fly free from the tyranny of paint.
Her wings no longer in shadow, but sweeping through archways
over marble halls, past portraits rattling in their frames.
Venus watching in her mirror,
John the Baptist with his head on a plate.
Slave money, plague pits, so much questionable history.
It's the smallest child who still holds her breath for a reprieve,
innocence in a vacuum. Lady Jane Gray helped tenderly to her fate,
blindfolded before the fall of the axe,
the fall of her own beheaded darkness.
The vanities of human life, skulls gleaming white.
Do you really dare walk through the gallery at night?

* Paintings referred to:
Joseph Wright of Derby, 'An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump', 1768
Paul Delaroche, 'The Execution of Lady Jane Grey', 1833
Italian, 'The Head of Saint John the Baptist', 1511
Harmen Steenwyck, 'An Allegory of the Vanities of Human Life', about 1640

The Paintings At Night

It's the sense of relief when the last of the squalling groups
troop out with their gum cracking teenage laughter.
The little old ladies who linger, as if being closer to the other side,
they suspect that once the doors close, the eyes that seem to be watching
are more than mere tricks of shadow and light,
but the imprisonment of lost souls painted into corners.

Their expressions no longer frozen, but flowing along the walls
in whispered rushes of gold and white.
A riot of colours racing through light sensitive halls,
the air brushed with centuries of stories
as the dust of all portraits is 99% human skin.

We slip in and out of the landscapes,
their swirling impressions of green pathways
leading deep into other worlds
as we breathe our mythic conversations.
A language of starry nights and crucifixions.

Doorways within doorways,
the magic of time travel after midnight
when the gardens breath shifting skies,
the horse gallops free from the frame,
and we are no longer a single expression, a moment frozen,
but all the hundreds of years that have danced in the moonlight.

We echo to each other. Who suffered most, who sat for longest,
whose been restored, who got hidden during the war.
Whose been painting of the month, turned into a postcard,
reprinted and sold a million times, catalogued, downloaded,
our faces pressed and contorted.

It seemed like flattery once,
but in the hushed quiet of our own eternal night,
we can't help but resent all this endless watching.
We never realised that life is just a rough sketching,
but now find we are layers and layers
of everyone who ever looked at us.

Who paused and stopped and saw something fragile
in the blue of a dress, the playfulness of a smile.
Who saw us naked for who we are.
Ghosts in the woodwork, trapped love stories, pearl oceans.
Tiny moments of reflection, haunting the lives of those we seek to portray.

Splinters and Gilt

First I smell it.

Custard, blood, carbon, vinegar,
armpits, dust, sandalwood, old paper -
the tang of all things organic, life
and death mouldering together.

Thousands of eyes squirm through
canvas and wood, oil and pigment,
to stalk me into the vanishing
point of glass doors.

The hum of today freezes copies
of old stories. Sea nymphs crest pores,
a saint clutches a skull to his body. These
are facsimiles of old bodies made ghost.

Then I feel it.

I am a blue-devil, glazed, transparent,
shimmering between stanza and picture,
shuddering through splinters and gilt,
sliding on the soft grease of human meat

spilled by women, naked and geriatric.
They fire up death - flaccid,
long past rigor mortis, head lolls,
neck snapped like a quick apostrophe.

One weird sister sits under a tree gnarled
into bloated, grey femininity. She traps
light as it leaves the stanza, takes no
chance, grinds it down in her pot of night.

These Hidden Hours

Vacuum-sealed we walk,
silent corridors, hearing
nothing but our breath.

We are ghosts
in these
hidden hours

where only the air moves,
haunting the halls
of the living.

The night
is a baby's eyelid
shutting the dusk sky.

Whistlejacket
on two proud winning legs
ran four miles

to victory.
We crouch beneath
his neighing pride.

Stubbs riderless horse
surveys us in an eyeblink,
waiting for a response

from a courageous jockey
To mount his back,
steer him

to win again,
let him taste
magnificence.

A young girl
turns to the safety
of her father,

smelling pipe smoke
on his cuffs,
shudders

at the bird
in the vacuum;
her first view of death.

The cockatoo,
his white feathers,
a fury of cloud-dust.

For every story
There is another story.
Each painting

finds it's footing
in the anchor
of imagination.

Speak,
and the moment
will be gone.

Witches

A body swinging from a tree, naked hags muttering the future,
a skeleton bird, shadow creatures,
a baby waiting to be sacrificed.
Some kind of ceremony, the bark as stark as evil,
the dusk gathering speed.
After midnight, can you catch their incantations?
Do the curses slip free from the walls and swirl in colours of sound?
Low laughter, the echo of footsteps, a landscape of fear,
as the anonymous monsters slither from their frames.
The old women understand that magic is an art, the past is a prophecy.
Their time will come again, even if now their spells seem nothing
but shades of light and dark. In the contrast of their preparations,
if you listen close enough the canvas is howling.
The artist damned, toil and trouble, raven madness.
Blackness cut away, stripped naked and left for dead.

* Paintings referred to:
Salvador Rosa, 'Witches at their Incantations', about 1646
Vincent Van Gogh 'Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear', 1889

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