(an autonomic response to a projected light performance onto the Usher Hall, Edinburgh)
what have I self-projected
onto people and walls,
the image of my thoughts
when the light stops?
what have I projected
on to everything,
laser sharp cares
on stone and flesh?
what have I learned,
that darkness projects
as much as the light?
keeping us all together, a mass,
art takes a box and
puts some rats in it,
and someone bellowed
‘we need a doctor’
with no reply, except
peristaltic gasping
at lasers in the sky,
and nervous systems
of twitch and react,
and pressed organs
a bag of off fall meat.
a thousand electronic
glow-worms responding, recording,
I’m dissenting from the chorus,
that coming together
that’s tearing me apart,
a voice against people encased
who don’t know how to be together,
or to give and take like a tide,
what it does to a body,
battering rams, battling rams,
mental violence, angry nerves,
fighting to see the show,
visions of crushing, of crashing,
of knockout,
seconds out, ding ding.
what are we projecting on
those blank walls of other?