Autumn Colour

My lungs must live in perpetual Autumn Colour,

Supplied with unfolding information about my coming death...

Which will come first blindness or death? I wonder ?

I know that the colour will keep me closer to the source.

I can tolerate the passage wrapped in a bower of cherry leaves.

Their veins like those of an erectile penis.

Then this empty branch can keep its whip like commentary.

While my personal God is somewhere fumbling to find a place

in the history of greater Gods.

Just as the mist clears from the red field.

I am held by sufferings, petty things in wider terms but disgraceful all the same.

This past has a smell of eternal rust, battery acid and the smoke from steam trains;

Interjointed with this is my father's revelation of man-made colour in his paint factory

on the banks of the River Medlock.

I knew the river higher up in the pure hills full of energetic boys, catfish and leeches.

My father knew it close to the forces of production and polluted Ardwick and Gorton.

The falling down factory opened its grand green doors. Signwritten in faded red and white

Thomas Hyland. Pigment Makers Beswick Est.1911.

Behind the doors, which were battered lay the treasures of the spectrum.

Loenhoeck and Issac Newton had worked here. Abstract painters in fatty acids.

The colour was violet next to cadmium and chrome yellow. in hundredweight piles and drying lumps It killed my aspiration to words. Bring it on home? I asked.

I will be an artist.

I knew then at such a tender age that to be a colourist, a colour striker was a blessed gift. The words would have to wait.

Autumn Colour

Two

I'd love to write about my heart, my hidden centre, my loves, my profound affection

But I am timid, in case I find that there is simply nothing there.

Too much is impossible for me.

A sad song, though to make it better under tyranny and in democratic circles one must be prepared to persuade.

Automatic writing, scrabble on the bed of nettles.

In my time, I've knocked on doors and entered lion's dens.

In faith and hope aflame with kindness and innocence.

It has led to angelic ruin and angelic resurrection. Sweden Borg and Blake.

Open and closed at the same time. What a business!!

Coming through chaos and catastrophe igniting the sky with intuition and pictures of living in blasted towns plagued by debt and television.

Post war Post modern Post 11.9.9.11.and slipping quickly away through parallel universes and solid systems.

The death of a man is not such a showpiece of nature's work

As the seasonal shrinking of the breathing of a cherry tree.

A man came to me this morning he shook my hand and asked the way to the morgue.

"I am going that way," I said "I'll show you."

He was going to see his brother's body.

We walked together he was tender and pleased to talk to someone for a while.

In touch with grief. In touch with him and his long time, brother.

Fraternal delire, hollow earth and meaningless money.

Take a look, take a look, the maquette of civilization and all around such mayhem

and in every misty field golden leaves. Pick up the money. Put it in the bank,

Spend, Spend, Spend. buy your heart's desire. But not your heart's silence.