Wanderlust: by Philip Kane

 Old need seeps through red steel and it dons a turban when it flows past the candles.  Like a whisper from the darkest canyon, where tailors’ dummies lurk in the expectation of meeting their prey, it writhes at the windows with a cobra’s ecstasy.

I am tempted to rip apart the notebooks that clutter the floor.  It would be a meditation on trees, and probably a triumph of classical music at the same time.  I am tired of the beasts that trample down the growing statues in my garden, tired of the cat I hung from the chandelier.  So it seems a good moment to sink my father’s boat in the harbour and drown all the options. 

That’s the conundrum that faces me whenever I open the door into the laying-out room.  I filled it, yesterday, with blue sheets and strips of torn newspaper.  I had hoped that it might resolve itself into a kind of iris, one with a clear calculation in the top right-hand corner, an illustration of Daniel Defoe on the cover, and a bent staple in the binding.  Instead, there appears to be an ambidextrous medicine-man nesting in the middle of it.  I found him chewing on his own shoe leather; he invited me to join him but I declined, regarding it as a ploy intended to lull my insecurities.

Obviously, the presence of a cup of tea on the lawn perpetuates a myth; that the more civilised the omnibus drivers of a country, the more floral its arrangement of armies and fleets.  Such stories, left to ferment in the rain, build themselves up into a cliff carved with the portraits of notable rapists.

I always wanted, instead, to codify the nocturnal wanderings of choristers, annotate the manuscripts written on trouser belts by deafened camp followers, sit remembering the callow youth of my conscripted guardians.

~ by londonsurrealistgroup on May 22, 2007.