Pictures are more ambiguous than words
and that is their attraction.
If I say, ‘girls, horses, cracks in your window on the world,’
it is just a phrase.
Too trite.
Too didactic.
Too empty.
I can pad it out a bit,
but there is still too much me
and too little you.
But the picture invites you to enter.
It has a smoky room with a warm glow of companionship,
the mounting excitement of expectations,
the exhilaration of the win,
the emptiness of loss,
unarticulated similarities between sex and betting,
an articulated sense of defeat.
It has voids to be filled and cracks to be expanded or patched up.
Fill the void and there is no room for excitement.
Patch up the cracks and your view through the window is obscured further.
But the alternative is to remain cracked and unfulfilled…
So much more in the picture:
more feelings,
more ideas,
even more words.
But also more work.
Ambiguity gives you all that you are willing to put into it.
Tag: poetry
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Girls, horses, cracks…
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Border line
Here you are,
building and re-building your wall,
on the border between the manageable stagnation within your mind
and the beguiling chaos without.
The wind of reality blows through the cracks,
soft but incessant,
frightening and alluring…
– Knock, knock.
– Who is there?
– Life. -
Still life before the storm
As you travel through England, you gain a visceral understanding of space-time continuum, for you can see time affected and distorted by space and vice versa, as you move between villages and towns, between pasts and presents, through pools of frozen time into the rapids.
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Pushed to the side
Derelict boats always make me pause. There is too great a contrast between an inescapably stationary object and its purpose – that of fast movement – encoded into its very shape.
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Light and shadow
Birds live in the light,
clear and bright;
freedom of flight.
Fish live in the depths,
swathed and complex;
joy of orgasm.
We live in-between,
under the skin;
over the chasm. -
Windows
I see the world through windows.
My preconceptions form perceptions,
creating a coherent picture,
a picture in a frame.
It irks me.
The limitation to my field of vision
is like an itch.
I want to leave the frame,
to stick my head beyond it into space,
to see the world just outside it
exciting, new – it has to be, I know;
I also know it is not an option –
the frame is in my head.