Abstract

A buzzcut Chinese teen pouts his lips to his thermos,
steam rolls off the bevel as from a mist-machine —
across the road men in grimed hard-hats sip coffee

gingerly from the machined hole in the lid.
Recently sandblasted walls have grown sensitive,
tricked out with red ivy that’s ruffled and shimmers

at the slightest abstraction of the bright summer wind.
Only the leaves dropped in standing water look cold,
bleach to a pink flesh-tone drying out on the slabs.

Cubes of blue cheese ooze from my foiled ciabatta —
the radiator clunked on, the Gerhardt Richter on my wall
peeled off last night, scallops of blue-tac left stuck to the plaster.

Still I’m sure to put the image the right way up this time
with the aid of the terse print in the bottom-left corner,
Abstract Painting, oil on canvas, 1992.

Anti-circ

The seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades...Let us worship the spine and its tingle. Let us be proud of our being vertebrates, for we are vertebrates tipped at the head with a divine flame. The brain only continues the spine: the wick really goes through the whole length of the candle.
Vladimir Nabokov

Once I cracked Lolita’s spine I found myself knee-deep in cheesecake;
my not-quite-fist unclenched, disclosed a wet cluster of blackberries.

Tennyson sank me into new car smell and a plush interior; the extras
threw roses and sweetmeats at my tinted glass across the cordon.

Reading Wilfred Owen I was Attenborough’s thrilled silence
breathing round a bird whose syrinx learned to imitate a chainsaw;

the walls of my house crashed down in fumes of plaster and rayed glass
the night I dropped Naipaul. Joe Sacco’s Palestine had the sad

dilapidated scent of changing rooms at school, plaques of mud
hole-punched by studs. Hopkins shone a walkable torchbeam

between rooftops; I felt gay as Mary Poppins then feared my mum
would drop me. Updike’s prose flaunted the revealed

cleanliness of a girl’s arse, its well-briefed sway up the stairs ahead;
and when I called up from the stacks Enoch Powell’s uncut First Poems

her skilled tongue agitated my thankfully intact frenulum.