Poem: 'Colour Climax (Random Broadcasts)'

COLOUR CLIMAX

(RANDOM BROADCASTS)

chromatic shift
into red

burning Nissan
spiders over M-way island
on stilts of flame

iridescent
petrol-blue
against red sky

woman silhouette
on bridge-span
dissolves into a
flock of starlings,
into arabesques of
gothic script,
incomplete psalms,
alchemaic incantations

two men climb down
from the embankment,
eyes burnt back,
socketted deep,
they run through
celandine and chickweed,
across acres of
exposed tarmac
where midges pulse
in filigrees of
breath

flesh open,
liquefies in flame
(a policeman in Halifax
asks to see the palms
of your hands,
his eyes are red,
pupils motes of
blackness settling
through sensurround sound)

starlings fleck the
Nissan bleeding into flame,
fighting over fragments of
flesh tufted with hair,
beaks smeared red

chromatics
shift…


Published in:
‘MELODIC SCRIBBLE no.4’ (UK – April 1985)
‘TEMPUS FUGIT no.8’ (Belgium – December 1988)
‘CABARET VERT Vol.1 no.1’ (Canada – May 1991)
‘MEMES no.5’ (UK – May 1991)
and collection:
‘POWER LINES’
(Unibird Publications) (UK – October 1988