Poems for an Exhibition

Gabriel Angel Moreno 2012

Parliament Angels You bore London in your ink womb, conceiving hands, heads and mouths, granting the silence of primordial time, colouring its heart, its political beat, its rumble of lords, summoning birds, atoms of chants for the urban clutter. The city was yours, you dreamt it real, traffic shattered when you spoke, you turned clocks into childhood toys, gold-washed skies roseate and mad, towers made gates of celestial lands and light warrants fluxed by your eyes.

Everything was real you shaped the soul of the National rail, our wings revealed symmetries of fish, a London of angels awoke from water, the face of Thames oneiric and green, revealing the mirror of all that we were, all that we would be. London was yours, you governed wise in thought surgery, every knot undone, every steeple clean, split by the knives of print incantation, you conjured dusk, the city breathed before that night, only you would see, only I remember.

Giulia Zaniol, Parliament, Angels of London, 2012.

Absinthe IV The world is green, dragon herb green. I am one with veils, my senses overlap. I desire everything, hands, lips, clouds, I am the final gate of universal whims. You endorse night my deities gander, the moon is drawn to objects of mind, you etiolate work, magnetize spheres you incite the soul, of colour and glass. Nothing is returned you wade the light, earth, stone, water funnels of the sun. I stand before you as the river bottle, diaphanous green, conduit of light.

I sing and I laugh, the mouth is open of forbidden birds, when you are near logic is contrived. I recite the lines of animal hymns, lust incantations. The world is green, ancient and green. Heart of the horse, spirit of the water, I want everything, I am wish gardens, you untie the arms of insatiable trees.

Max Lowry, Absinthe IV, 2009.

Everyone O the bright day we were dissolved into men and wine, thought into hand, born to other eyes, voyeuristic pools. A hundred heads preaching the song, we became notes, communal hymns, I bellowed my pains and sank the world. O truly we were what we could be, boisterous masses containing gravity, I waned like you chattering moons. The virgin bridge, liquid paradoxes, we ourselves in us unfolding solitude, in baffled crowds, in oceans of sand. O where I roamed your mind was near, I’d lived to sing the thought of me, for a tale of soul I traded darkness.

The fortune of men in a circle-dance, my dormitory mind, my sedentary self, death to the parts resurrection of rings. O I know not why I begin as you end, if we are to burn like common stars may it be unlined under a single fear. The golden hen, the couch-future, hollow my words, my teacher’s pets, inhabit my despair, evict my soberness. O return me the day we were undone, in the city of fish, dissolution of Self, song of the whole, coalescing waters.

Dénes Maròti, Everyone IV, 2011.

Time well spent You, lucent openings, suspended house-temple, I remember you home of the Time well spent. I recall the cape of cartoon skies, window optics terracing the world, a thousand futures shimmering green, our soul contained in placards pink, the grand promises of your symmetry shaping the garden, erecting the signs of our time-eternal, of our space Jerusalem.

I remember you, crown of geometry, totem of brightness, thick neon fonts marketing Atlantis, celluloid spheres for modern minds, certainty of heights, fortitude of squares, you contained night in our man-angles, you framed pain, pacified darkness, you branded time. You, the lucent tower, green house of desire, I remember you home of the time well spent.

Will Martyr, Time Well Spent, 2010.

Eclat You conjured the mountain, the hunkered giant we lay upon to blow out smoke. I was just a child and you, though overgrown, sketched in black and white, nothing escaped you, you charcoaled the birds and every omen of our future. You said we were sublime, tree deities in torn jeans endorsing timelessness. I trusted you you were the mountain, it spoke through your eyes. Then light awoke with its graduating lens, you twisted and turned, contorting in the rising sun like etchings in a fire, your clarity was gone.

The rock changed, the cards changed, everything changed, you cut your hair, revived your flame in other lands, on other chests, summoning mirrors, hope, virgin turf for the faith giant. I remained entranced, every night envisaging the mountain, awake on your belly of snow, summoning the jump, summoning the fall, a lover’s éclat, Plato’s parapenting.

Lisa Denyer, Éclat, 2009.

The forest Your mind is the forest, the idea of the forest where everything goes. The time I was there you were covered in snow, a golden canopy above us forged nails with the light, trees were figures of despair, there was pain in the wood, petals in the sky inhaled me, I was your thought-temples, your climate of longing, I was your dream seasons. The dusk was everlasting, ochre endings unresolved,

I claimed parts of the scene, the impossible parts where you and I were one in the bark of desire, in the fortune wind, in twin-fold wonder, in fables of affection where you and I belonged. I never returned to your mind, the forest, the time comma, the moss environment, veneer of candescence, bateau of distortion, halo of insanity, terrace of the voice.

Alex Gough, 2011.

Images Courtesy of Orion Contemporary Text © Gabriel Angel Moreno