Poem: 'Scenes From A European Movie'

SCENES FROM A

EUROPEAN MOVIE

(OR THE ETHICAL EQUATIONS

POSED BY PAUL KLEE

DANCING WITH

A GERMAN SHEPHERD)

“Art makes visible the unseen” – Paul Klee

Along the edge of the Gothic archway,
starlings disturb the air, only slightly.
Its soft-focus architecture casts
exact shadows rippled by delicate wings.
Beneath misted silence
he waits, for the next victim.
Stubs out anticipated eyes
as if they’re cigarettes.
Envisaged screams are cyclic,
trapped into repetition.
Around him the air moves in
listless tides of tactile coolness,
siphoned by tangents of light
through time-scabbed brickwork;
past stone faces wrinkled as lizard skin,
its passage resembling that of
women howling through key-holes.
He conceals Sirius in his fist,
Scorpio in his molar cavities, and
dreams of cars that explode and cartwheel.
He remembers he first saw the girl
reflected in the wing-mirror of
a parked Renault, and turning,
no-one was there.
Now he imagines her
riding empty compartments
on midnight subways,
he throws clocks through
eternally shattering windows,
alarms ringing in 2am gutters.
And he waits for the next victim
to come out of the city of the dead,
and they will be like the dead,
dressed in rags
and with faces ravaged by disease.
As he waits
starlings disturb the air
only slightly…



Published in:
‘FIVE LEAVES LEFT no.1’ (UK – April 1984)
‘ZENOS no.7’ (UK – July 1988)
and the collection:
‘SUBVERSIVE ART AT POPULAR PRICES’
(Purple Heather Publications) (UK – January 1988)