Blag Jazz

The Yielding Flesh of the Girl
- Bernini’s ‘The Rape of Proserpina’

Prosperina weeps,
not for the shameful solidity
of that moment,
but for the skin behind your fingertips
lost and branded to fantasy.

Fire transformed to marble
and gagged by liquid stone,
her own hands face upwards
pleading balance.

Yet you find tenderness in this cruelty.
Her struggle sacrificed
to the immense struggle
to get your artistic imprint
on her femur.

She weeps for innocence
through her malleable thighs.

Self (Marc Quinn)

You took 8 pints of your own blood,
Froze it, and out of it
You sculpted your own head.
Art, on a life support.
Most people were disgusted.
A wretch really echoes
In an art gallery.
Red really chokes conforming white.
Behind the glass case
Your untamed, decapitated animal sat,
My very own Lord of the Flies.
It spoke to me about
The fragility of life,
Questioned who, out of the two of us,
Was more human.
My gut instinct when faced
With you looking a million pounds
(or around that rumoured, at auction),
Was to lick.
To erode your sorbet cheek with my tongue
To taste, in cold blood.
I researched that the head and the blood
Both take up 8% each
Of the weight of the human body.
I wonder if you knew this.
I wonder if it has any significance to your vision.
I think of how you must be
So much colder
Than the death mask.
I think of you every time
I get a rush of blood to the head.

Ode to a Fly in a Ceiling Light

I see you
you don’t see me
but this is not
police interrogation glass

This is you, preserved
in neither amber nor sap
but your own plastic shell
intrusively electronic
it doesn’t allow for
eavesdrops on the wall

Suspended sentence

in light and air
the speck
on the room’s eyelash
death becomes
a constant 60 watt day

Making John Lennon Come

You write all the naughty lyrics, John
and I am finally calling your bluff.
It’s been months of silent
sexual attraction,
months of licking lips
to find no taste,
months of pornography on mute.

I am ready for the crucifixion
of your matter
and mass of vulnerable hair,
your arms outstretched
bigger than Jesus.
I already know you’ll spend the entire time
with your eyes closed
either in prayer or boredom.

Oh, you’ll make me consider both.
Giving me that cynical stare
as if the world was always
asking you stupid questions
then yanking that sardonic tongue.

But I know you are just
the birthday boy forced to play
somebody else’s party games,
the child sat squirming
in the hairdressers’ chair.
A boy refusing to rose-tint dirt.

I don’t fancy you, John.
But if I can’t make you laugh
then I want to make you come.

I want to see that look
of infatuated terror
somewhere in the back of your eyes,
the one Paul wears
so incredibly well.

Dirty White Everything

The worst thing you ever did
was to make me feel self conscious
about the scar on my left arm.
As if someone had told me
my favourite clothes
didn’t suit me.
Or my over rehearsed dinner party anecdote
wasn’t funny.
I can only imagine you now
covered in blood,
looking like you fell out of purgatory.
Dirty white everything,
dull as prescription drugs.
They tell me I fall in love too easily.
Sharing beds with conveyer-belt idiots,
breathing, like two junkies,
into each other.
But I have held him sober,
and seem to be the only one who knows,
man never really set foot on the moon
unless he took off his boot
and felt it between his toes.