Issue 16: May 2010

Judy Brown| Jane Draycott | Wayne Holloway-Smith | Amy Key | John Stammers | Heather Philipson

 

JOHN STAMMERS

Once

i.m. M.D.

I have never seen you stand more gracefully
that at the corner of the new century
when we were expecting portents and encountered
merely the slow, somnolent march of young men,
the hell-bent kind, as they moved across
into full disillusionment with no more than a wince.

Your stained countenance announced for us all
the right attitude to strike: that of the wounded
in a land of thorough well-being. You were like Christ on one of his last visits home, before he departed
for his Father’s house somewhere over the clouds,
which might be Nebraska or the Sea of Japan
or any one of those alternative heavens
we have come to adore from the travel posters.

I, for one, never doubted you. You madman.
Never once thought you were anything other
that what you allowed your devotees to claim you to be.
I have known genius and I have known lunacy
and this was a kind of genius for lunacy.
When you fell, you made sure it was a long, long way.

Existential

When we designed the world we found it necessary
to leave room for the absences.
You will notice there is a good deal more emptiness
than objects. This ensures that when an item
passes out of existence it may be accommodated.
It would be more correct to say that the world is composed
both of the things that are and the things that are not.
the same holds true for people. When a person passes
they become a void precisely equivalent to themselves.
In a regrettable misapprehension, there are those who believe
they can in some way perceive the lost ones.
They give names to such things: ghosts, spirits, visitations.
I assure you they cannot; they that are gone
are gone for good and all, and are manifestly absent
in every way. So much will surely now be obvious:
otherwise they would be unable to occupy
that particular non-existence corresponding to the former them.
Since the beginning these spaces have continued
to grow in number with no sign of abatement.
It is our conclusion, therefore, that in the end
the whole of existence will be a single miraculous absence.

Dead Alsatian in a Vegetable Crate

Like an old overcoat lumped in the damp corner of an attic,
its mass gives off a faint, sweet aroma,
one visible eye like a button beyond a blink.
His ear is folded to the shape of a twisted cuff
and from the gape of his mouth his tongue
, his hanging tongue, continues to evince
his one positive emotion which is glee,
as if, for a last encore, he has just gone through
his entire box of tricks, sit, roll over, play dead.