The Process

Everything starts in the field – some thistles, say, or a bunch of moss.
These get reformed into bandages. Then spitting cloths.
Then the ragman turns the spitting cloths into paper.

Enter me, the ‘maker’.

I purchase paper from the ragman by the hundred sheet pack.
I fill every sheet front and back, then I place the sheets in stacks
for the Nightmen.

When the Nightmen come they buy my jottings for a decent sum.
They don’t read them. No need.
They twist the paper into wrappings for tobacco, weed –

worse stuff – roofies, golden girls, bad bean.

When the Nightmen get arrested, as they often do,
no one ever questions you-know-who –
even when I tell them to.

Even when I stand in the station and ring the bell.

I say: I’m sure my words are culpable!
But the officers reply from their neon lair:
Madam, you need to get this clear.
Whatever you’ve written? Makes no difference here.


Charlotte in Aesthetics

Charlotte in aesthetics says
that to remove a tattoo
she has to laser the skin.
The laser picks up the ink
and thinks it’s hair –
then it burns the ink off at the root.

Charlotte says it plain like that because
clients need to know
there will be pain and bleeding.

Charlotte says that everyone cries
at some stage during proceedings.

Even the men with tribal signs around their waist.
Even the men with cunt on their arm.
Even the men with tears.


Grief / Installation Piece

For years we thought this kind of thing was imperious and very distant.
Then we found it was contemporary – very much of our time.

Looking at it more carefully
we saw that it had of course all the characteristics of modernity:

seriality; mundanity; the shock effect;
the way the common object is taken out of context.

It caused terrible conflict, both among us as a group
and within each of us individually.

We wondered whether this was the intention.

My own impression was of a grey field with twelve grey tombs.
It was steely, and somewhat cold.

I didn’t love it.
I didn’t want it.
I didn’t even like looking at it.

But I can’t deny the impact it had on me.

I mean some days

I think I might never get over it.