by Tim Liardet
Where water, glass and light cut through each other, where one side
of the glass is underwater and the other is not, one cosmos
seems first to bisect, then kiss, another. Up against the steamy divide
the octopus explodes and collapses, explodes and collapses
in its soft hysteria of saying: it is compelled by will or ennui to be
wholly on display, compelled, like any extraterrestrial, to show itself –
This is what I’ve got, it says with every lunge, I’ll show you all I’ve got
which you don’t have, this head, for example, clumsily bashing glass
like a blunt-nosed angel’s, a throb of plasma. Though many limbs flower
crazily from this eye-lens, it says, I don’t know what it is I’ve got
but here’s the centre, the centre where it is. And you a man, a woman,
it says, and you neither or nothing at all – a smudge in need of an apogee.
You don’t know what I am or what it is you are, you do not know,
whatever you are, whatever you are, whatever you are.
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