YELLOW CHRIST

EVENING OF A FAUN

 La nebbia is sixty years in the past. 
Hysterical primadonnas sing 
About their loss of roses. 
A band strikes up. It’s midnight From my window I see flames pour Out of Etna’s vast mouth. All the girls in via Lampedusa Are adoring the spurting eruption As if the marbled dance floor wasn’t enough. As if paradoxes danced the tango As if staring eyes formed waltzes The infinite ranks of colours Formulate a hundred lives In a single second or vast eternity. Scorched in an endless desert. I wish I could say sorry To the volcano. I wish I could Summarise fiery sunlight at my window. Or the fibrous hair’s breadth By which my childhood outlasted The vivacious, glittering lightning Of the past. Put your head On my pillow, Medusa. (No your Not that bad looking. Your ancestors Were Greeks anyway.) Your wild Bitter tears enfold Etna framed In a moment, dying as no other is. 

YELLOW CHRIST

 Elemental recesses Lost imaginings The immense circular Wilderness, blue, noirish. An inert diptych points to: My Christ is pampered Hung by his balls to the cross To the ovulating light To the unending womb To the odious, hazy Autumn. To the Mother Superior’s diaphragm To everywoman’s sphincter To muscular dystrophy To madness in Muswell Hill To chemicals sapping our collective will. To my photo of Pol Pot Fornicating on Uncle Joe Stalin. To various homo-erotic scenes To contempt, to paltry things To pathetic mice on You Tube. To being so fucking politically correct Why can’t you shave Ireland! 

CARYATIDS AT EUSTON STATION 

at the British Library caryatids gaze 
across the station's entrance to unseen 
gazing sphinx eyes of strangers 
portrayed within each stone enclave. 

the eyes still achieve absolution
 or journey into space across the station 
edging towards a great confession 
sullen sentinels of furtive spectacle. .

 Paul Murphy