_______________________
ROBERT HAMPSON
tiger stripes
4 carrol clarkson/simphiwe sesanti
because these were not my compatriots
though they looked like me & spoke my language
because my time was not my own but sold
in gated compounds, air-conditioned rooms
no ancestor spoke to me through my dreams
though I have braided my hair into corn-rows
no ancestor waited for me in the dark
now the line tentatively advances
& these braided lives have been transformed
as the first scratch in the earth writes the plot
against gas & batons & rubber bullets
my time was not my own but given
& these are now my companions
As if they looked like me & spoke my tongue
love’s damage
4 sophie robinson
stutters ratio of white
violence through rigid trauma
murder of market abstraction
hypergraphic pressure & mark
broken letter resolution image
streaking low-end longing
falls into serotonin trance
disused words blank unknowing
chokes lyric razorblade blush
bled into bodily refusal
bypasses flush-left margins
shrugs off scattered fragments
intimate erasures & blackout
the third cowboy
4 frank olsen milne
cycles solo round the streets of cambridge
360 degree morning observation
a gaseous planet moving faster
at the equator than the poles
traces a yellow spectral signature
through parkers pieces & along the backs
charges flares & geomagnetic storms
disrupts the grids & sets the world on fire
radiant rider from daybreak to dust
when the stars sink into the western ocean
Thrinacian herds of red cattle
driven over the Amarillo gas-fields
arc-welding airships & MRI scans
cowboys? I guess you could call us that.
dead return
4 jinny
interrogating eyes
from an unreachable past
dispossessed, at the mercy
a face that disturbs us
with the pathos of lost futurity
immobilised by the lens
to become a thing
blanched & water-marked
degraded by the decay
to which it too is subject
neither breathing nor moving
the marker of presence & absence
& between the two
the sign of our own future death
(with thanks to roland barthes)