John puts the grey stone into the cold box
In the cold box there is a grey stone
In the cold box there is a stone there is greyness
In the cold box is the grey stone John put there
John puts aluminium into the cold box
Jeff puts a yellow crayon into the cold box
In the cold box a yellow crayon rests beside a grey stone
In the cold box a yellow crayon rests besides aluminium
They are safe in the cold box —
the grey stone, aluminium and the yellow crayon
They are there in the cold box
They are things in the cold box
Sometimes the cold box is the eye
Sometimes the cold box is 'memory'
Sometimes the cold box is mind
Sometimes the cold box is language
Sometimes the cold box is a flamingo
Sometimes the cold box is an instant
Sometimes the cold box is 'there'

Sometimes it feels like the manual of my touch is almost over
October ampersanding down the afternoon
John connects the red triangle with the bone
We drank sambuccos in the cafe garden, while a cloud
shaped like ‘so what?' formed in the sky above our heads
The diary of my red palms has so many entries saying ‘Blue, nothing'
The desert acacias were in leaf
The chemist of words mixed together
the azure acid of melancholia the rook acid of foreboding
The laboratory was deserted the windows smashed
and dry leaves were scattered across the benches
Then the cloud melted to a hazy map of November
& still changed

I love Vincent's crow golds & the adding machine of Homo sapiens
the sublime suffix of our life, the post-multiples of fates
I was busy making loss shaped like a yacht to place in a Zen container
a little paper boat like Rimbaud's child's boat at the end of Le Bateau Ivre
sails of clear alcohol a bow like a bender
I placed a small doll of my not-daughter in its hold a likeness like emptiness
The summer sky, later a shepherd's delight, sipped me
through its hot brittle straw
& the walls were ready to be painted & John & Jeff were there
Jeff signed his imaginary name in yellow crayon on fine paper
The hurt woman was trying to plug the gaps in her world with tears
Her hands were red and her face was red and she hated it
Knowledge was in a coma, and respite was in a comma,
and the massive impersonal fortress of other people's lives could not be taken
That was the city and in that city I failed
The season reared like a cliff-face: Let's climb

we thought with our hands swallows gaining purchase on that violent sky
& it makes sense, only too much sense until winter,
a category of sleep, and further respite
Ferried out by crematoria (those heavy smokers) the Red Woman
could no longer put bone to the red triangle
I suffer from motion sickness and now can no longer pray
in the Symbolic Church of the Red Truth
Indeed the compression of symbols like Knight Fool Queen
only gives me the bends
The forest of red hypotheses deepens as the red trees
The private chapel is still open

If you could apprehend my grief would you care? Would I?

Copyright © Michael Ayres, 2003.