Outside:Sombre stone and glittering Douro. Inside:Ecstatic saints.Rococo in Brazilian gold.The rapture of a Moroccan massacre.The rhapsody of Jesse’s tree.A tangle of victimhood and victory. Between:A lunchtime rush for salvation.Immortalising souls with disposable cameras.Violence in their viewfinders. Beneath:The dead in boxes.A destination to consider.
You serve no one by being small,She says, as if we can trust police.There are no cynics in her studio. We rise, lock eyes and close them –A flow filmed, what? Five years ago?Two thousand and seventeen. To think (though we should not be thinking)That was before the rings, the dog, the limp,The leak, the …
The week bucked,flicking the rotoscopefrom white cliffsto ranked crosses. Replacing the elephantwith a bleachedcolumn of fossil,churning silt. A twisted shoepreserved beneath glassstamps the mind. How to slipthis sorry pieceinto the shiningmosaic of victory?
You declared day, naming sunrisewith strong singsong voice offering the worldthe whole waking world and the prospect ofearning a dollar.
I roll the zoetrope back, gauging itSo cliffside cities sputter into acid sprays. Crests of roadside poppies and oilseed rapeRun to the Rhodopes, gilding wide plains.
To find a way forward, we have to look back. Hop into my time machine to survey the systems used by artists like Bowie and Cobain.
There’s an abundance of wonders in the world. The egg you ate at breakfast could spark a story of obsessive love and betrayal. Just ask Patti Smith.
Hemingway wrote with a pencil in one hand and a drink in the other. And the booze didn’t seem to slow him down. But what was his accelerant? What kept that pencil moving?
On summer evenings, I kick up dust in London parks. In winter, I skip from one streetlight to another. I’m always jogging. Because I love it. Because it fuels creative work.
