In-Between #12 - Sean St. John

ten minutes fast

skin-slashed chopping board artichoke hearts

left over from dinner broken

tipped knives used as back-garden circus throwing stars

pent up anger of adolescent sons stone

flowerpots overgrown on sills with thyme

the metallic clock runs ten minutes fast on purpose

past two am landlady in bed and everyone

a conversation I had this evening about cezanne’s portraits

with a russian artist from germany stays with me

shouting over music brushstrokes technique and images

of snow she loves as we sweat in bars and now

my new apartment has given me a new mind

dormant psychosis energy absorbsion coining words

            only writers awake dreaming about being writers

            and other writers writing hidden in the dark

peacefully drunk I flick through pages

of a Bob Dylan novel I found but psychedelic

lyrics are too long for this decade

I’ve been taught to love one-line philosophies I can paste

into twitter with phone camera shaky pictures

attached to no relevance and animals dancing

at the foot of the stairs leopard-skin high heels

kicked off two weeks ago snapshot for vogue

on black and white criss-crossed floors

where gritty factory photos remind me of watercolour nudes

I’ve never painted and I no longer know my own friends

with ex-fathers of the greed generation

while we suffer from despondent disillusions and diffidence

towards a future rental fee extortion outbid on art

the comfort of piracy everything’s ours on a two week loan

and we only have these thoughts when the sun’s off

duty supervision from the stars climbing

the stairs we hope to find

sex in our beds and forget about fluctuating thoughts

of emotional extremes that really should be

looked into if I only knew a doctor

and ideas for inventions we don’t understand

and messy kitchens inter-continental disputes

untidy phrasing cheap replicas of life itself

we can just fuck until it turns to love

and let the world crumble under someone else’s watch

with no woman to watch him translate beowulf again

serenity in the loneliness of words loneliness

as he embraces the empty concept of humanity

non-existent realism abandoned for stories

personal glories the myth of perfection and connection

Biography: I suffer from the terrible affliction of writing poetry; it’ll be the end of me, I know it. I sleep with an unread classic under my pillow every night, but I’m yet to remember any of them. I daydream about the day poetry becomes a viable profession; those Romantics don’t know how easy they had it.