at a performance of Dr Caligari the other day a shadow
shaped like a tadpole suddenly appeared at one corner of
the screen . . . The monstrous quivering tadpole seemed
to be fear itself, and not the statement “I am afraid.”
Virginia Woolf

in the moving past
something tastes of mint
printing of matter and coin.

Beginning in the lab
patently the pain is a case for the pay-off
a cabinet even

for the debris on the cutting room floor
doubles as a sea bed
and it’s swelling there bottom right:

tumoresque tadpole in amphibian night.
It phosphors; this fostered child
foetal, fatal

comma or colon
our submarinal appetites swell.
The drives at varied speeds

will soon settle
a light granular crust
forms on the silvered surface

 

 

Copyright © Simon Perril, 2005.

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Simon Perril lives in Oakham, Rutland. His first full-length book of poems, Hearing Is Itself A Kind of Singing, was published by Salt in 2004. Other publications include Spirit Level (Equipage, 1996) and New Tonal Language (Reality Street 4packs no.3, 1999). He has also written widely on contemporary poetry, and edited Tending The Vortex: The Works of Brian Catling (CCCP Books 2001). He is currently working on The Salt Companion to John James, and a monograph on contemporary British poetry.