Crash

Just as Lennon climbs a ladder
to read the word YES writ
small, so Kopek finds a mirror
to reflect his own soul.

At The Exhibition Of Smashed
Windows, in prismatic light
through a nineteen-thirties leaded
pane, displayed in fragments
with all the reverent due care
of religious icons,
he pauses in epiphany.

Jagged edges of glass,
captured on the brink of falling,
have such fragile beauty
and such a threat of violence,
both at once, in crystal
clarity, that the artist’s pained
acuity is felt
as razors slashed across his eyes.

Beside the blunt statement
of one plain plate, crazed and shattered
by a single punch thrown
with fixed intent, there are photos
of the artist’s injured
fist. Her raw wound is gaping, red,
glistening with revealed
sinew, as pornographic as
an open pussy shot.

Then follows the meandering
track of scab encrusted
stitches: a flesh homage to Beck’s
deco Tube map design.

And finally, the filigree
work of fine silver scars
that link ley lines to mazes with
Celtic paths of power.

It is a ritual of space
defined by savage acts
of vandalism and Kopek
is compelled to respond
by reaching for the shark-like maw
of a splintered windscreen
and daring it to bite his hand.

The artist witnesses
him slice his fingers and reacts
less to his spurting wound
than to the irreverence shown
her work; the damage done
to its integrity. He laughs
and offers to pay cash,
as if for a gift shop nick-nack
knocked off its shelf. From such
an unpromising start,
the tabloids spin a weird romance
between a modernist hack
and a hippy chick cum wack-job.

Under direct sunlight,
or without concealer, her face
reveals a beauty shaped
by trauma: her elfin nose born
of being impact crushed
then carved anew; her lips twisted
in a sardonic smile
that does not touch her eyes, for no
laughter lines can form where
muscles loosen with nerve damage.

They slow clap in the crowd
at Altamont and jeer Jagger,
whose sympathies are lost
when he confuses The Devil
with Hell’s Angels… He fucks
her from behind on the rooftop
garden as The Beatles
play Get Back one last time… The Dawn
of Aquarius is
heralded too soon by naked
singers on a stage, whose
philosophy of peace is scorned
by Kopek’s new-found voice.

He writes in fragments: disconnected
paragraphs: meta-prose
about unlikely heroes: non-
linear avatars
and psychopomps who state: the joint
is out of time: products
of a Cold War fought in jungles
and across chess board squares:
his style dictated by a sex-
life driven by her urge
to replicate the adrenal
rush of oncoming death.

Between their bouts of bumper-to-
bumper collisions, brief
moments of lucidity bring
him to his typewriter,
where he pounds the keys with fingers
slick with sweat and the musk
of her arousal; so he slips
and fumbles words, forgets
the thread; cuts the best bits out with
scissors and patches lines
together to make some semblance
of sense out of chaos.

She holds his hardness in a grasp
made light and teasing by
her healing tendons not being
able to flex and close
her hand, while the rough striations
of scar tissue caress
his glans and stroke him to climax
with breathless speed and force.

He spurts – she aims his cum to pass
through the space where her face
once broke a windscreen, now enshrined
as an exhibit, twice
anointed by his life’s fluids.

She says, ‘The boundaries
of Art transcend whatever ropes
we may place around them.
Objects are viral. They infect
our minds and spread. We live
in a culture where these things grow.’

And so Kopek suspects
he is merely a component
of a performance piece:
their love is an installation
in the wide gallery
of the outer world, while inner
space is being plundered
of its treasures; empty
walls on which he scribbles nonsense.

She takes champagne to bed:
frigs herself into a frenzy;
grinds her pubis against
the bottle’s neck, but cannot find
release. In frustration,
she breaks the glass, then hammers it
down to sparkling flinders
on which she rolls and writhes. Her skin
achieves a crimson glaze,
a frosted coat of ecstasy.

She claims to be pregnant:
he denies possibility
and proclaims that the next
generation is blank. What comes
after the crash is X.