Vertigo

 

You fall before the final scene,

Tipped from the lip of suicide.

You try to fix a stable point,

Out there, beyond the camera stare.

 

Her face is lit in vivid green,

Your clammy palms and dripping tongue,

Obscene in spirals, circles, swirls:

You’re trapped and haunting streets of lust.

 

Obsessive cycles, garish forms:

You can’t avert your preying eyes.

You pray to find one last release.

A dress, a gaze, address, a death,

 

Then life – a woman, painted, pinned,

An object of your falling dreams.

 

 

response to the film “Vertigo”.

 

 

The Night I Saw “Babette’s Feast”

 

On Brighton beach I watched the birds

Form dark aurora round the pier.

The sunset burned their patterned swirls

As afterglow across my mind.

 

I watched them as they sucked the light,

And dragged it down beneath the waves,

And when the neon broke their spell,

A lonely soul, I left the sea.

 

I went to watch a late night film.

The cinema smelled old and cold.

I drifted through a dreamlike meal,

In darkness tasted beer and bread.

 

A solitary watcher blind:

A film as still as life and time.

 

 

response to the film Babette’s Feast, and to art house cinemas.

 

 

 

The Hound of the Baskervilles

 

Around St Petersburg the fog

Is emanating tales of fear.

Its rotten stench has howled for years,

It spreads malignant myths of death.

 

The truth behind the curse is raw,

A void as deep as Russian steppes,

Where generations wait for word

Of riches mired as feudal hordes.

 

Those truths are never glimpsed for long:

They’re flashed as fugitives of code,

They’ll raise their dues and feed the hounds,

They’ll drag all wayward souls beneath.

 

The bleakest marsh has tales to tell:

For all around they’re tales of hell.

 

 

response to the film Приключения Шерлока Холмса и доктора Ватсона: Собака Баскервилей (The Hound of the Baskervilles): the version directed by Igor Maslennikov

The Draughtsman’s Contract

 

The mirror carp outlive us all:

The monarchs, heirs and breeding mares.

The moat is thick as Irish blood,

It laps the brutal sandstone walls.

 

The clues are strewn across the fields,

And scattered out beyond these isles.

The desecrated arts of love

Can claim their ownership of graves.

 

Each day the gardens yield their fruit:

The murders, pomegranates, limes.

Exotic cultures lust for growth,

And envy is an ancient crop.

 

He goes where fame and money lead:

To shame and torture, birth and blame.

 

 

response to the film The Draughtsman’s Contract

 

 

2001: A Space Odyssey

 

The universe begins in light.

We clutch its bones, we twist and sway.

For us the sterile void of space,

Is all there is and all to be.

 

The emptiness within, without,

Is spinning, weightless, wordless, bleak,

A hollow home to hold our heads,

And birth our dreams, and leave our dead.

 

We step beyond the body’s shell,

Traverse the glimmered track of stars.

We trace our possibilities,

And raise our heads in wonderment.

 

We walk the stepping stones and sparks,

And drift forever through the dark.

 

 

response to the film and novel 2001: A Space Odyssey

 

Black Narcissus

 

The bell is tolling to the storm,

From peak to peak it magnifies,

Until the wilderness is filled

With crash on crash of peeling bronze.

 

The fall: its horrors kept inside.

The fall: its myths and anguished guilt.

The fall: a never world of sin.

The fall: untouched, unblemished lust.

 

And still the bell is drawing howls

From all the broken hearts, repressed.

It shatters spells of hidden dreams,

It makes belief, it makes it scream.

 

The fall was beaten from the clouds.

The mountains break the passion’s fall.

 

 

response to the film Black Narcissus

Withnail and I

 

The eras end with wrecking balls,

And eyes so dark they look like fights.

Just try and touch those stars again:

You know you’re made of light and dust.

 

If peace and love are sold as slaves,

And aesthetes all have broken hearts,

Then all that’s left is rain and pills,

Those rapid fading hopes and dreams.

 

So take your wine to Camberwell,

And walk your wolves to Primrose Hill,

And join the ghosts at Camden Lock:

It had to crash, it rose too high.

 

You face two ways when made to lose:

Regret the end, embrace the fall.

 

response to the film Withnail and I

 

The Third Man

 

Between the lines of chaos left,

The shadows and the rubble piles,

The cats, the beggars and the old:

The ones whom death had overlooked.

 

He makes a simple killing there:

Chiaroscuro trades at night,

Around the Hofburg’s ruined walls,

Beneath St Stephen’s tarnished gold.

 

Sewer deep the devil rules.

An overspill of human loss,

From steppes and mountains, bombed out towns,

They cry to him through wounds of waste.

 

He’s there: a light to pry in graves.

He’s there, to light the caudite charge.

 

 

Response to the film “The Third Man”.

Three Colours: Blue

 

The beads of simple, tinted glass:

Between each one the links of loss.

The music of their chimes when touched:

The glittered schisms, splitting light.

 

Each facet shines with bitter dreams.

Each angle cut betrays a past,

A slight, a trap, a loveless chill,

And yet a life which always was.

 

The threads which bind are rarely seen.

Beneath the beat, a universe;

Between the beads and solid earth

The scattered force of freedom’s cost.

 

The grief which comes with cutting loose

The bluest segments of the sky.

 

 

Response to the film Three Colours: Blue.

Solaris

 

Above these tides of dreams and life,

Where birth is but a breath from death,

And all the fears you thought you’d fled,

Can gather round to smooth your brow.

 

Above them – can we say above? –

They flow, they ooze, they doubt, they prove,

A conscious flood of yesterdays.

What made you strong – that quivered lip?

 

That toy you held, because because you knew

It couldn’t last? You gripped it tight.

The love you held as if they’d leave

A note for you, and nothing more?

 

The tides keep rising from your past:

On each remembered kiss there’s blood.

 

response to the films and novel “Solaris”.