There are sketches on the walls of men and women and ducks,
and outside a large green bus swerves through traffic like
insanity sprung from a waving line; Turgenev, Turgenev,
says the radio, and Jane Austin, Jane Austin, too.
"I am going to do her portrait on the 28th, while you are
at work."
He is just this edge of fat and he walks constantly, he
fritters; they have him; they are eating him hollow like
a webbed fly, and his eyes are red-suckled with anger-fear.
He feels hatred and discard of the world, sharper than
his razor, and his gut-feel hangs like a wet polyp; and he
self-decisions himself defeated trying to shake his
hung beard from razor in water (like life), not warm enough.
Daumier. Rue Transonian, le 15 Avril, 1843. (lithograph.)
Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale.
"She has a face unlike that of any woman I have ever known."
"What is it? A love affair?"
"Silly. I can't love a woman. Besides, she's pregnant."
I can paint- a flower eaten by a snake; that sunlight is a
lie; and that markets smell of shoes and naked boys clothed,
and that under everything some river, some beat, some twist that
clambers along the edge of my temple and bites nip-dizzy. . .
men drive cars and paint their houses,
but they are mad; men sit in barber chairs; buy hats.
Corot. Recollection of Mortefontaine.
Paris, Louvre.
"I must write Kaiser, though I think he's a homosexual."
"Are you still reading Freud?"
"Page 299."
She made a little hat and he fastened two snaps under one
arm, reaching up from the bed like a long feeler from the
snail, and she went to church, and he thought now I h've
time and the dog.
About church: the trouble with a mask is it
never changes.
So rude the flowers that grow and do not grow beautiful.
So magic the chair on the patio that does not hold legs
and belly and arm and neck and mouth that bites into the
wind like the ned of a tunnel.
He turned in bed and thought: I am searching for some
segment in the air. It floats about the peoples heads.
When it rains on the trees it sits between the branches
warmer and more blood-real than the dove.
Orozco. Christ Destroying the Cross.
Hanover, Dartmouth College, Baker Library.
He burned away in his sleep.

I form and practice
the smallest hidden
dramatic gestures
from within the simple
mouths of spiders
There
the secrets are in
quiet handprints
Fortunes are passed
from the ceilings
The lights are
wise and silent as
the gaze of
Chinese tortoise

Beggars line the busy streets
cup and cloth outstretched
the look of desperation etched on their faces
like the dawn shadow of a carved lithograph

they don't ask me for spare change
just a simple nod of acknowledgement;
even after a shower and a change of clothes
I must have their look, that broken beaten look
the look of the street.

George Square is busy today
tourists happy clicking panoramic memories
admiration of forced foolish bravery at the Cenotaph
a list of names they will never know
and marvel at the antiquated architecture
to later revel in the wonderment of how anyone
in a civilised and modern society can do without skyscrapers
while they grudgingly share a half-measure of a single malt

I sit on a bench that marks a families love and remembrance
to the passing of a woman named Judith
the pigeons flock in carnal mass gatherings
knowing I've been there for 3 hours already
because I have the look of someone who hides his crusts
because I have the hungry eyes of the look of the street.

The well dressed man at the end of the alleyway,
the plume of carcinogen cigar smoke
like a coal fired power station  in the sunlight
this is where they go for over-priced craft ales
with Sautéed Wild Rabbit starter and £65 Wagyu Tomahawk Steak
a place for fine pickings in the alleyway ashtrays
dispensed cancer sticks left disregarded
the half-finished defiance of another £9 packet
that was simply spare change to begin with

I hover around making false promises on a deadline phone call
pretending in mime to be semi-OK
that the compadres are running late
and "tell me about the theatre show later"
the misdirection amid the camouflage of plastic peace lilies
while my other hand rummages the unspent tobacco
and the black-on-black door steward keeps clocking me
because I have the look of the street.

This board is not on the wall. It rests on a worktable against a wall. It’s almost the length of the table, perhaps a foot short. On top of the board its wooden frame makes a shelf ideal for photographs or cards to balance precariously, photographs and cards too precious to pin. Today there are five, yes they change from day to day, and today (from left to right) there’s an original drawing in walnut ink of a winter field, a photo of two children looking from a cliff top towards a peninsula’s end, a card called Autumn Spey from a lithograph by Angie Lewin, an invitation to a gallery opening, and a What’s On brochure – from another gallery – showing some unusual tapestry.

The Notice Board is 100 x 60 cm. The wooden frame is slight, probably home-made, but well-made, with a dark brown hessian surface. Not that you can see much of the surface as it is covered with stuff: photographs, images, poems, pictures, cards, quotations, a prayer, an origami bird, a doctor’s prescription, a piece of tapestry, an invitation, an address, lists galore, a cheque or two, a diagram (of a knot), a concert program. Not everything can be seen directly as many items are shared by a single pin and hidden four, even six, notices deep. Every so often the items are unpinned and consigned to a folder and filed, and so the process of choosing and pinning starts over again. This can happen after a holiday, returning uncluttered by days walking the cliff paths with only the quiet sea to gaze at and the cottage blissfully free of things known, things owned.  So when back at the desk, in front of the notice board, it seems right to be beginning again.

Mozart’s Linz Symphony is playing quietly in the background. It’s that time of day when music is sometimes allowed to frame work at this desk and blot out the going home noise of buses in the city street moving away from the stop three floors below. Linz, the capital of Upper Austria and now a large industrial city straddling the banks of the Danube, once gave its name to Linzertorte, a cake of jam, cloves, cinnamon, and almonds, and this remarkable symphony by Mozart. The composer had only just married his Constanza and wrote to his long suffering father:

When we reached the gates of Linz . . . , we found a servant waiting there to drive us to Count Thun's, at whose house we are now staying. I really cannot tell you what kindnesses the family are showering on us. On Tuesday, November 4, I am giving a concert in the theatre here and, as I have not a single symphony with me, I am writing a new one at break-neck speed, which must be finished by that time. Well, I must close, because I really must set to work.

And set to work he did. He had just 4 days to compose, write the parts (though Constanza helped), and rehearse an orchestra. Such is life for the working composer, even today. Maybe not a summons from a beneficent Count, but a phone-call from a producer with a deadline. It is the film or TV score to be composed at break-neck speed. And it can be done, believe me. It may not be sublime as Mozart, but it gets done: there are ways and means.

But this is today’s background, and as these words are written the gracious siciliano of the Symphony No.36 plays away. Such a tender confection.

Looking up at the notice board where does one start? Each pinned piece is a divertissement, an aide memoire to times, events, places, and people. It is a mixture of the colourful, the curious, the necessary, the unusual, the nostalgic, and the personally precious. These things are the qualifications required to occupy a place on this board.

But now Haydn takes over the musical background, Symphony No.88. No descriptive name here, just his wonderful music: his first symphony to score trumpets and timpani, and with more than a touch of Turkish in the Minuetto and Finale.

So close your eyes now (let’s listen to Haydn for a while), then slowly open them and choose from the notice board what first catches your attention.

It’s a coloured sketch of flowers on an A5 sheet of cartridge paper. It is outlined delicately in pen, coloured variously with pastels, green, orange, purple, red. The vase is a glass bowl. It’s set on a window-sill and there’s the frame of a window faintly rendered. There’s no artifice in the arrangement. These are flowers from a garden, picked and now firmly ****** into the bowl. Immediately the long, quiet east-facing room comes alive to colour. It’s in shade now the sun has moved since midday when the flowers arrived after a journey of 40 miles in a hot car wrapped in moist newspaper and silver foil. It is a special gift and its beauty remains vivid for days. When visitors visited gentle comments are made on their fresh colours.

At night when the room is only lit by a standard lamp standing by a pale yellow settee the flowers sleep in the darkness, holding a vivid memory of a day of colour and light. A recording of the Schumann quartets plays passionately during the ‘close to the end of summer’ evenings. Hands are held, and between movements there is an occasional exploratory kiss. Such was their collective fear of passion overcoming other endeavours . . .

In the early morning time when she slept in the room next door oblivious to his wakefulness he would enter the long studio room with its four windows to find the first sunlight patterning the floor. The flowers were wide-awake, their perfume rich in the still morningtime. He would stand entranced to see such beauty brought from her city garden; the first of many gifts he would come to treasure. His sketch was an amateur’s, but four summers past it continued to give much joy and dear memories. It had something of the solemnity of Mozart’s siciliano, and if an image could be said to have a right tempo, it had a right tempo, a gracefulness roughly hewn perhaps, but full of grace.

He's got too much money
And he wants to play
"Let's see, what money can do, really."
He'll buy that Lithograph
For you at the auction
"That's some introduction", you'll purr
But what's money, really, when you don't have morals?
"A whole lot of fun, ***, and cars.
Oh, my manners. Did you want some?"
He'll tempt you
But it's just a game
He talks, he pays
He walks away
He looks back at you
With his arm around a pretty predator
She asks "Did you want to play?"

How can we tell if anyone is at home?

I wish you had come in a box, I'd open you now
A tin can would be too small unless we were playing dares.

I don't accept these terms. We could have been arrested together
And then we'd have another piece of paper with our names on it to enjoy.

The letters I've been sending you are shorter.
I prefer when our names are closer to each other.

That copper lithograph you made and the limited edition prints,
Those are still so ******* rad.

You left that white leather bag with the gold hardware at our apartment,
Iridescent purple crochet needles, what appears to be the beginning of

An autobiography you must be putting together. I'd be lying if I said I washed and folded your clothes. I only folded them.

How long will someone's natural perfume stay on clothes?

I don't delete some period's.
Sometime's the worst punctuation is the kind that stays forever.

I miss you more than the addiction to painkillers I kept up until
Two months ago. I've been making the necessary upgrades.

They don't have a word for how much you mean to me.
A monogamous flightless bird that serves at the pleasure of its mate

Was the closest I came to showing you not only that I'd carry you
So you didn't have to walk over the scalding lava, but that

These limbs are fitted for your form. My legs will never grow weak.
Beautiful extraordinary things adults do with their mouths

For hours and hours and hours if they like.
After lips move and speaking does not require voices, whispers, or tells.

Waking up with my arms wrapped around your leg, My head laid
In the valley of your belly button.

Everything great of me was incubated with your body in our time.
It seems we shucked everything good from your tiny body

Until you lied yourself into believing you weren't worthy of such
Immense happiness and pleasure. You have not put me away.

Your lies were lies, if only to reinforce cognitive distortions.
Being brilliant and beautiful is the curse we agreed.

This venom is three years young and flying first class, one way, with four Checked bags, rocking forward to urge time forward.

What will bring the smiling back?

The temple mounds and eyelids sewn into the lines where lips
Greeted the fantastic strands of gleaming threads in your birth crown.

I have pictures of our pictures.
I have shoes for my shoes, and their tongues are hanging out.

We introduced each other to cool. I introduced you to your body
And for three years we ****** six times a day at least.

I wear your California necklace and studded leather cuff always.
Still nothing and no one could ever come between.

Heavy flow, blood letting, and mainstream apostrophes, and
Still we are bending time and making up gravity as we go along.

We became the Villains we hoped we'd become,
But the monster that is ripe on my skin is glowing.

This is the fight I'm not going to let up on, I will not sit down until your Cappuccino with agave and steamed milk is ready for you in bed.

You wait on me like a polaroid whose shadow looks to be a ghost
But ends in contrast and a lack of exposure.

I drank the poison too and left enough for you to use.

when the sun shines through

on the lithograph of John

in his cave on Patmos

you should probably go outside

the park is nice this time of year

don't forget to lock up

the thief cometh

How can we tell if anyone is at home?

I wish you had come in a box, I'd open you now
A tin can would be too small unless we were playing dares.

I don't accept these terms. We could have been arrested together
And then we'd have another piece of paper with our names on it to enjoy.

The letters I've been sending you are shorter.
I prefer when our names are closer to each other.

That copper lithograph you made and the limited edition prints,
Those are still so ******* rad.

You left that white leather bag with the gold hardware at our apartment,
Iridescent purple crochet needles, what appears to be the beginning of

An autobiography you must be putting together. I'd be lying if I said I washed and folded your clothes. I only folded them.

How long will someone's natural perfume stay on clothes?

I don't delete some period's.
Sometime's the worst punctuation is the kind that stays forever.

I miss you more than the addiction to painkillers I kept up until
Two months ago. I've been making the necessary upgrades.

They don't have a word for how much you mean to me.
A monogamous flightless bird that serves at the pleasure of its mate

Was the closest I came to showing you not only that I'd carry you
So you didn't have to walk over the scalding lava, but that

These limbs are fitted for your form. My legs will never grow weak.
Beautiful extraordinary things adults do with their mouths

For hours and hours and hours if they like.
After lips move and speaking does not require voices, whispers, or tells.

Waking up with my arms wrapped around your leg, My head laid
In the valley of your belly button.

Everything great of me was incubated with your body in our time.
It seems we shucked everything good from your tiny body

Until you lied yourself into believing you weren't worthy of such
Immense happiness and pleasure. You have not put me away.

Your lies were lies, if only to reinforce cognitive distortions.
Being brilliant and beautiful is the curse we agreed.

This venom is three years young and flying first class, one way, with four Checked bags, rocking forward to urge time forward.

What will bring the smiling back?

The temple mounds and eyelids sewn into the lines where lips
Greeted the fantastic strands of gleaming threads in your birth crown.

I have pictures of our pictures.
I have shoes for my shoes, and their tongues are hanging out.

We introduced each other to cool. I introduced you to your body
And for three years we ****** six times a day at least.

I wear your California necklace and studded leather cuff always.
Still nothing and no one could ever come between.

Heavy flow, blood letting, and mainstream apostrophes, and
Still we are bending time and making up gravity as we go along.

We became the Villains we hoped we'd become,
But the monster that is ripe on my skin is glowing.

This is the fight I'm not going to let up on, I will not sit down until your Cappuccino with agave and steamed milk is ready for you in bed.

You wait on me like a polaroid whose shadow looks to be a ghost
But ends in contrast and a lack of exposure.

I drank the poison too and left enough for you to use.

“You like too much!” she said to me.
“Make up your mind!” she cried.

An inkjet cartridge emptied of its contents
The things it could have produced, if given enough time.

She
was allowed to eat poetry, the ink dribbling down her lips,
Soaking her shirt in the black stains of abstract words,
Distracting comparisons, and personified stones coming to
Life.

She
resurrected lithograph golems,
who groaned at the consumption of their
Content.

But me?

Why does my pencil glide across the page?
I should have taken to the study of flesh and blood
unlike the girl who speaks in tongues.

Perhaps…
Perhaps she’s right.
Perhaps the world doesn’t need another performer on the world’s stage.
Perhaps… there are already far too many.

My tongue ripped out,
My brain purged and washed.
No more slicing into pages
With my graphite-knife.