Issue 1: July 2003

Karen Annesen | Simon Barraclough | Helen Clare | Simon Rees-Roberts | John Stammers | Roisin Tierney

SIMON REES-ROBERTS

Another Conspiracy Theory

Somewhere off a Belgian motorway or else behind some Piedmontese confectionery factory
but probably in France — some business park, outskirts of Ste-Paul-de-Vence (and not the
     pretty part)
is the secret academy — prefabricated concrete. The sign says Fabrication des Mannequins.
The passing tourist smiles: the quaint surrealism, dummies propped up on a loading bay,
baking in the sun or rained upon. They're fooled. This is a testing ground
for Living Sculptures: sad Pierrots, Christofor Columbo (hot in Barcelona), Charlots,
Little Nells and loads of Shakespeares, all unflinching at the taunts of training staff:
Wanker, Call yourself hard? or there's a scorpion crawling up your arse.
Those enrolled for the Advanced Certificate Course are subjected to water cannon
     and CS gas
before, 'go out into the world and bore the socks off visitors to Key West,
     Stratford-upon-Avon, Rostoff-on-Don
and every re-furbished, cast iron, Victorian market, be it Fulton St., Smithfield, Les Halles
     or The Waterfront.'
Let's hope each Nell or William will be frisked by mean Security: who funds this weird
     academy?
Don't want no sculptures doing Kamikaze and who knows if they've all contracted SARS?
Insist each Living Sculpture wears a mask. Sad if the end of life as we know it
were the fault of some faux-Greek-bronze-body-painted-discobolus
who collapsed on the pavement just as we'd goaded him into throwing it.

In Spring

Picture an expansive mass of tulips,
drooping, with their petals soon to drop.

Once more I'm dazzled by magnificence
now I've placed them in another vase.

Some glass fragments from the earlier breakage
glint like rubies on my notebook's page

and rings of spillage from my coffee mug
have shrunk down into tacky scabs, like blood.

Outside, the laden boughs of blowsy cherry
are suffering from gasps of 'oh how lovely.'

My neighbour opposite, octogenarian,
is freighted down with six-pack Evian:

a wise precaution (never know how much
she might appreciate her radio and torch).

So, we are living in the land of plenty:
neat garden frontage to half-timbered semis

where sunlight slants across red ochre tiles
against a fluffy cumulus-laden sky.

It could be that archangels lifted us,
just as they had done to the Virgin's house,

then eased us down here, to a safer place
cushioned in this soft suburban peace.

For us a accident of birth and luck
our sky's not filling up with acrid smoke,

the thump of mortars, slash of rotor blades
above our neighbours, pinned-down on the pavement,

being searched by men whose foreign tongue
jars with our dimming memory of birdsong;

luck that we're not expected to relate
how our concerns are trivial — choice of paint

for lounge or bedroom, value furnishings.
Keep the focus tight on little things.