eternal apéritif

God came and left the world bogged down, 
transient with options
but who can see them rise and fall, 
come in spells and slip away
like a heat map of a virus.
I read before that it was sticky, 
they liked it, there, 
up to the neck in it, slurping.
It was awesome. It was not perfect. 
It was bad and sometimes It was good

Although everyeach has more than onlyone
we still miss each other, always.
(I need you now, and always.)
Painful, certainly,
but still I am not done with it, 
this eternal apéritif.

I have been told I should not tell
or pretend there is no voice —
while maintaining a work ethic, a spirit, 
and purporting an ethic. 
Incompatible compass! Direct me to the line.

Make a board for it, because of the responsibility, 
our shared responsibility.
But who does it lay down for? 
Do I belong in a cloister?

I can copy very nicely. 
For a while we all just copied quite nicely.
But the master left a silent ow, 
a great whole for an empty mouth 
and a dethroned king, bound.
I hate it when words are poured into the untrue and cruel.
I like to watch milkmaids dip their tits as they churn.
I want to take advantage 
of someone skinny and romantic;
I’ll have him later, gasping. 

That should however, stay behind my curtain — 
here I’ve been ignoble 
and each sheet will flutter away,
exposé.
We tried, believe me — 
I tried God for to succeed you, 
Virginia!

Perhaps it is an alright dance, 
perhaps it is enough.
I laid out no fruit, 
no flowers, 
no leaves blew on the window drily, 
just reams of scratches on the record. 
Perhaps the howl shall stop, 
but I still prefer it to the bourgeoise lot, 
and a preference for the rod. 

---

I wrote this poem in 2018 and found it while looking for a piece which concludes with ‘and it will be the wind’s love’, which remains lost. 

‘eternal apéritif’ contains many preoccupations that still dominate my work, but that I wasn’t consciously aware of at the time: cycles of life, death and rebirth; a fractious relationship to divinity resisted, rather than denied; and the role of the postmodern artist in all of this. Its central theme of tragic rebellion against the Good was a shadow obsession I only faced head-on in the last year. The speaker could well be Ivan Karamazov as a girl. The episodes the poem foreshadows are also of interest, as I had no lost great love at the time and viral maps were no regular feature on the news. Five years on, I am happy to find that I may finally be tired of an eternal apéritif — I am increasingly prepared for the main course.