Tag: animals
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Inca Doves
Is it odd to say I thought of you as I pulled a dead dove from the swimming pool? Spine up to God, floating lightly with its bright beak face down. Streams of red outlined the strange sight. I gently scooped him up, ignorant of sex, his eyes closed so gently as if in…
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Bitumen and Pork
Four busts and an image of creation. BITUMEN AND PORK was an installation to mark the post-performance cabaret of FEAST, a work by theatre company Clout at Battersea Arts Centre in 2014. The performance charted the gradual alienation of mankind through a framework of breakfast, lunch and dinner. The installation BITUMEN AND PORK was an…
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Soap / Eternity / Rendering
INSTRUCTIONS ON A BAR OF NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY SOAP Do what you want, live how you want. Get it behind your ears and all over the skin you want. Do not think about machines. Read what you will, focus your eyes on grime and slime and free will. Or grace,…
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Our Wings
Fair is fair, and clear is clean. Clean air is clear, clear air is clean, though I fathom the factories fair fouled it up. Particulate, exudate, aerosols, mud, benzene, dioxins, DDT, blood. Filthy factory runoff grimes up our groundwater. Oozes thin. Gurgles thick. We slide and we slip on greased oilcloth earth. Our dirt is…
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Liquorice
With drains for legs the rain runs off you And though it’s always cold, (with lead for legs) it’s not wet. Black roots are hard but damp liquorice runs like mascara Making pandas of eyes Heavy like the lid that the scent lifts on memories as distant as feet, Ash boots the fag ends…
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There are 355 letters in Genesis 4:9-13
An excerpt from a sequence of 31 perfect anagrams of Genesis 4: 9-13 in which Cain shares an apartment with Father K. in a disputed territory. Genesis 4: 9-13 And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper? And He…
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Eating Meat
In nearly every case, something died for you to go on living. Even a vegan or raw food diet requires suppressing some forms of life. With no exception, the lives of microbes, insects, plants, and indeed, a great many animals, are at stake each time we take a bite. Whether we like it or not,…
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Forgetful Worlds
Milking parlours are the place of an everyday cleanliness that is found nowhere else. It is difficult type of cleanliness to describe: not tidy in a domestic way, nor sterile, like that of the operating theatre or science lab, but more a work-a-day scrubbing that ensures the milk passes from udder to tank as pure…
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Proper Burial / Clean Machines / Wheat Head
Proper Burial Each thing we take from the earth requires we bury something of equal value. Dinosaurs buried each other, where they fell, feathered, and massive. Still later, we bundle whole ships with furs for warmth, and spices to trade beneath the earth. One age buries another, patting dirt upon civilization. Dogs understand the…
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Parakeets and Purity
Because the land, the country, is such a focus of horticulture, there are important moments when its extraordinary fetishisation has connected it with movements of the extreme right: rhetorically, to simplify, the land becomes the fatherland. George McKay, Radical Gardening I live in north-west London. Sitting in the living room…
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Of a Mouse, To a Mouse
The clean pink two back feet he has have long toes almost like a bird’s. Unlike a bird’s, the tail, a draggled earthworm, limps behind his search. Head joined on distinctly to a face but not a neck to speak of. See his oildot eyes like little fleas and yes, they’re shiny! really! Shining eyes!…