The Waiting

Gustav Klimt, detail of 'The Waiting'

And if I fall,

The same ground against which I crash

Will push me back afloat.

And if I cry,

Waves of tears will wash my soul,

So I can paint it back from scratch

In bolder tones.

And if I hurt,

The pain will remind me

One more day, that I am alive,

Ready to bare-knuckle box

Frustration.

And if I’m ripped apart

All-healing hands will nurse my wounds

And recompose this puzzled body

Kiss by kiss.

And if I cease to be

There will be nothing to shiver for,

Nothing to strive for,

No delusion, no belief tiptoeing

This imperceptible wire of hope.

And if I love,

And love well,

And if I am loved back in return

There will be warmth,

And comfort,

To help endure

The waiting.

La Forza

Artist: Eugenio Tomiolo

Nude and plethoric,

Like the day he came into this world,

Standing before the chopping board

Savagely tugs at a joint of prosciutto

With a blunt knife.

He looks at me sideways,

A jealous ravening beast of prey.

He is the lion, and I dessert.

The picture disturbs me

And excites me in equal measure.

I could fuck him right here,

No hesitation,

Knife in hand,

Tense and hairy body against the wall,

Thighs clinging to his back.

Needles

Last night I dreamt that I had needles stuck on my throat, a handful of them stubbornly piercing the tender flesh, refusing to be swallowed down or coughed up, simply stuck. I woke up bathed in sweat, feeling a sharp pain where they should have been had the nightmare been real. I wondered whether there was something I needed to say, an intelligible urge struggling to get out of my chest despite my efforts to conceal that I am panicking, a bubbling fear in the pit of my stomach furiously rising up in a screaming crescendo that crashes bluntly against my closed lips and falls back down, too exhausted to find its way back to where it came from, deciding to lurk close in case my mouth relaxes its guard and decides to let it out. A tension cankering within, a fear that the present situation will continue as it is, like these needles, immobile, refusing to develop or rot to death simply stuck. An image builds in my mind, the tarot card representing the hanged man, a man hanged from his feet to the branch of a tree with the blood rushing towards his head impairing his capacity to think a solution, to imagine and create the possibility of escape. A man with a strikingly serene expression despite his situation, what is he thinking? Is he suffering? Does he struggle or does he decide to surrender to his seemingly cruel fate? According to what I have read he is going through a process of growth, embracing the sacrifice of what needs to be left behind and forgotten before real development takes place. A slow, binding and painful process. Self-sacrifice. And I ask myself whether he’d rather be enjoying life’s simple pleasures, standing on his feet blissfully ignorant of his own inner depths, reluctant to accept the spiritual dimension of man and eagerly welcoming the tangible rewards of the material world.

Poem (Untitled 27/07/10)

I have pulled my heart out of my ribcage,

Tearing every last battered vein

Pushed my fist right through the flesh

And scratched inside the tight wound

With my sharp, blackened nails.

Now it is no big deal, out of loneliness,

To crawl inside a perfumed chest

And believe it a paradise of warmth,

Neither it is to blame out of drunkenness

One’s own tormented madness

On the full moon, that hopeless whore

Pinned to the sky with a silver chain.

I have downed pints of silence

And poisoned my senses in denial

With overdoses of pride.

Now I have been humbled.

He pushed me down on my knees,

Till they bled against the floor,

Pierced my shield of indifference,

Fucked me to the root.

I have been chewed and bruised,

Now I remember how it feels to be alive.

Virgin and Child

Fèlicien Rops 1833-1898

Madrid Nights (To Lorena)

Remember out battles against the sun

For nights without end?

Oh, my sister, my lover!

The world seemed a magical place

As we rampaged through its ranks

Of fanatics, freaks and beautiful madmen,

Clad in gloom and appallingly drunk.

Every night was a carnival then,

How I wish I could press rewind and

Live it all over again!

We poured crimson marigolds

Over the darkest hour

Chained by the neck to one another,

Priestesses of a secret cult of pain.

Our hearts fed on ether,

Our desperate teeth crunched glass,

And we snorted our youth by the handful.

Our dreams were brittle and doomed to collapse.

As we grow we wither,

And remembering we get resentful.

Oh, how I wish I could embrace you once again!

And kiss the edge of insanity with lips

Frenzied with dance and poison.

Anatomical Theatre

Since I went to see Exquisite Bodies at the Wellcome Museum last year, I have fallen in love with nineteenth century anatomical models.  Art and Science coexists in them. They are delicate and precise, morbid, beautiful. They are exquisite pieces of work to show us the developments of anatomy. They were born out of a necessity for anatomical models which would not rot, there were no fridges then, and also out of a shortage in real corpses, much on demand in a period of booming investigation. I fancy they are kind of tragic, these open bodies, vulnerable to inspection, exposed to thousands of prying eyes.

This Anatomical Venus rests in the Natural History Museum in Florence, Italy. I have found the pictures in the web titled Anatomical Theatre, a virtual museum of anatomical models and medical artifacts  ranging from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. To see and read more about this fascinating world click on the images below.

Click here to see the Anatomical Theatre site.

Click here to see images of the theatre installation

Romain de Tirtoff, Erté (1892 –1990) Russian-born French artist and designer

Click here for more Ertè

Odilon Redon (1840-1916). French painter and graphic artist.