Sculptures of nothing

for STEWART LEE

Substantial vultures
Stalk ailing prey
Through elephant graveyards
In the cold light of day.

Veiled intentions
Are unspoken pacts;
Aesthetic pleasures
Are unproven facts.

The senses succumbing
To an unholy haze;
Memory’s spectrum
Made so many greys.

Meat in the field,
Meat in the street;
Meet in the bowels,
Meet in the peat.

Cultures of mourning
Anticipate grief
While the light of the evening
Rises beneath.

Songs of the spirit
Sung by the lungs;
Stairways to heaven,
Short a few rungs.

Answers are questions
In the ears of the young:
All of creation
Contained in one tongue.

Inklings of instance
Demanding Danegeld:
To have and to hold,
Be had, and be held.

Performing bonobos
Operate guns
At picket line borders
Under Indian suns.

Figureless shadows
Blind the best seers;
David-Tibetan
Personified fears.

Informative stories
Battle for space
With virtual debris,
Leather and lace.

A plague of knowledge
In a Trojan toad
On the hard shoulder
Of an empty road.

A salty parchment
In a mouldy cave
Begging to be bartered
To a better grave.

Uncontacted tribesmen
Throw spears at planes.
Veteran surgeons
Transplant their own brains.

Amateur masons
With excellent tools
Build structures to die for
For ungrateful fools:

Houses of sand,
Cathedrals of stone,
Castles of happenstance,
Coffins of bone.

Worms of reluctance
Digest our best hopes:
Unwritten letters
In sent envelopes.

Pragmatic dogma
Proves crime doesn’t pay:
Sculptures of nothing
In marble, in clay.

Appears in:
Mistaken for art or rubbish [2013]

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