Gross - Love Songs of Carbon

See the effort of scraping the paint across that surface. Almost pain. And the stuttering, crude and approximate edge. His own skin drying: scleroderma. Paint on that.

But sackcloth Paint that dries before its left the palette. That has to be dragged, already crusted. There could be despair in this. Or freedom, knowing that already were too late.

Like waking in the darkness, your heart thumping, but no other edge to your body, lost sensation of its borders just this, dull percussions surging. In, out, sure as the tide. If a tide could be dry.

See our two (do we even own them?) bodies sense each other, waking in the dark; each would know if the other was gone. We give out presence, weather, transpiration. Life is work and work is heat, the one sheer gift; we hold it here between us, just to spend on, subcontractors to the sun.

Look closer: every other one, turned up, turns out to be a repossession, the hermit crab squatting withdrawn in a bubbly funk with its cutting gear stacked at the door. Here, there and there, holding its breath, a garnet gobbet of anemone. And us? Were a long way from home; the cliff, the pier even, have a way-back and other world look like an opposite shore. Statistically, on average, wed be fathoms under odds against us, in the long view. And yet here we are: you, me.

Or, in our terms, Decay; lay down your intricate molecules: fruit, meat. skin flakes. Reclamation crew, night-cleaners, makers and-breakers of what we let slip First the self engorgement of the peach then its shrivelling. In the moist, the dark room, the ghostly blue-grey of the lustre on the plum skin is developing its imprint of the after-life. Then again: from a further remove whats the shimmery bloom on the rind, the lichen on the rock in orbit, but us: cave moss bristling its tiny luminescence in the black of space?

Small crude galaxies, a curdled Milky Way. Mould colonies as fertile and contingent as the flood-banks of the Nile. A year or two since this was new, clean, see-through; now, accommodating to the state of nature, almost as close almost as inside our own skins, as out of reach, its interior weather casts an aquarium light. In it, no one looks well.

Re capitulation. In all things, the silent sonata. Or simpler: a five-finger exercise, the great performer breaks us down to arpeggios: barcodes, black, white, yes or no, of the chromosome code, its racks of fractal demi-semi-quavers, not so much the art of fugue as the state of one; suddenly, among its tireless tiny repetitions a slip And were gone. Its a matter for us who are matter, who hang on each least note of it, of life and death.