poetry : lighthouses have the same aspirations as cathedrals
Right, so.
Original poetry, complete with architectural metaphors and making jokes about symbolism.
It's been a bloody long time since this happened, but someone asked me to write them poetry, and I couldn't say no.
arc-boutant
or, more informally, the renaissance ruined everything
or, even more informally, love poetry for the spiritually challenged and emotionally bereft
1. caught in the metaphor / you blink
everything's a lighthouse round here
in this house
verbalising the beam into a girder
building a tower of babel between our fingertips
till it turns our touches into wings
and makes for the sun.
(Icarus.)
all the good myths end badly
but there's a joke in there
self-aggrandisement
shakespearean irony
cool to the touch and realised like steel
knitting together.
skins into skeletons
a structure made entirely
of words muttered into the surface of flesh.
2. in the French Style / our very own gothic revival
about gaudi, they said:
“Qui sap si hem donat el diploma a un boig o a un geni: el temps ens ho dir・”*
gaudi was a genius but he's got nothing on us
we are: sitting amongst the metalwork
fingers laced into cables
performing miracles
time will never tell, because the question is flawed:
you have to be both.
here's the thing about gothic symbolism:
lighthouses have the same aspirations as cathedrals
you can build one from the other;
we do.
3. vertical fixation / every building is babylon
the best place to build this city is on an airfield
the upward looking earth that already knows what it means
to be constantly left
to have its buildings pull up their wheels and take off.
ground that is robustly aware that that is all it is
breeding ground, incubation chamber
none of the buildings in our city will ever take root.
This, in itself, is not defeat.
wandering cities:
all of them do it, ours (as always)
just more literal
our highways are bloodlines straight into the horizon
our flying buttresses really do
forty years in the desert
where we just hold hands.
4. stylistic schisms / the windows turn to mirrors
modernism comes like a curse
all shattering of windows
and flattening of arches
divine geometry
reduced to graphing paper:
there is nothing sacred about a square.
(the gilt rots in the warehouses: we bypassed baroque)
but the opaque glass in the wandering city
sucks up everything in its wake
sky, sea and earth
the city is filled with itself
& breaks out of microcosm.
when the sun rises the skyscrapers steal all its light.
we are no longer just representing the universe.
all the good myths end badly
but our office buildings are oceans
jutting up from the desert
tethered to the ground by strings of syllables
gleaming in the morning
trails of spit between two pale and bitten mouths.
this place has no history
and rewrites itself.
*"Who knows if we have given this diploma to a nut or to a genius. Time will tell."
Tell me what you think.