Exhibition in the Watch This Space pantry, 2nd-17th May, 2019.
i
My friend told me if you press your ear to gum trees at certain times of day you can hear them drinking, which was funny because it wasn’t the first time I’d thought about being on the inside of a stem. Once I put the aperture of a green sound hose to my eye and my friend put the opposite opening over their eye and we looked each other right in the pupil down the green tube. It felt fresh and organic, like a sapling sprouting in time lapse. Another time I stretched blue tarpaulin over a gap in the wall so the rain wouldn’t come in and ruin the wood we’d just stained. It tinted the whole vestibule blue. I know its dark in there, inside the trunk, but I picture it illuminated as though bark is tarpaulin. In that way, I suppose the only difference between capillaries and a stem is the colour. Light filters in and the mood follows suit.
ii
Capillary
For most of history you kept quiet miles under the colour of light through thin tissue,
helix, foreskin, eyelid, shapes burnt purplish on retina after brightness, thinking luminous
blood-vessel brown was the permanent state you flicker out of for anywhere between 0 and
122 years before the dip back. Now they say the aggregate light of 200, 000 galaxies averages
a weak latte, which fucks with your idea of prenatal atmospherics, milk being too opaque
for anything as robust as tenured matter, preferring the universe before and after you
to resemble a womb depicted in educational videos, foetus backlit singing jazz
in a noir film graded red.
Your torso is a lampshade hot air ballooning your inner workings about. No way is it pitch
black in there, otherwise Jonah would’ve gotten bored unable to fashion playing cards
from krill in his whale belly speakeasy. You like to imagine objects as a series of filters
between light source and receptor, none fully capable of complete obstruction. You equate
eyes closed with being dead though only play at it. No such thing as near death
experience. Even your dreams adopt the hue of the entire cellophane spectrum over
stage lights. You need blinds on your room window, less to effect the interior of a chard stem,
more for privacy.
Eternity is a bat wing sun eclipse, a light bulb in a pelican’s pouch, it’s Pachelbel’s Canon’s
muffled descent from speakers pressed to the belly’s apex osmotically cultivating intelligence
and taste. Your baby has brown hair and its mind’s eye is bloodshot. Their masterwork
is whatever they’ve most recently finished and it glows like a hot log. Like you, they predict
translucence, a gore-tex death shroud, the diffuse smear of calm unfamiliarity. Meanwhile
morning is outside, very bright and cool as a sheet.
