Engine of Conviction

This piece is of my ex-girlfriend Sarah. The poem in it is actually legible, and faces the viewer. I managed to get the poem published in 2003 - though I only got told that, I never saw it.

I did a show that year and was interviewed on TV whilst completely manic (see the bipolar and Paul page) and I never saw that either. I should have... I wanted to, but that is part of the whole thing, really. I make a pretty convincing mad artist sometimes.

I got to quote an entire poem on camera, hit on the journalist and when asked how I was at the inception of the interview, replied "I... am flush with the heat of my own evil."

I was too disorganised and crazy to find out when the show was being telecast, or to get a copy of the magazine that published my poems.

Oops.

Sarah was a published poet as well.

Engine of Conviction

By Paul D Robertson

Bitumen, 140x 90cms.

Sold

And here's the poem that is written into the piece: (please don't judge it by the fact that it's a POEM i know I probably would - and take the time to read it).

Watch hands on an ancient clock, slow but still moving. Clicking in the dark when there's no one home. Echoing in a hOh, fuck yeah, watch hands on an ancient clock, slow but still moving. Clicking in the dark when there's no one home. Echoing in a hall with light spilling in through the frosted glass.

Like when the game is over and it's time to hold and time to kill, the very very last drop of milk splashes onto the page and the very very dark blue moves in the corner. Walking with me to the end of the isle pewter cups full of thick liquid that catches in the back of your throat and makes you sputter like a fire or a kerosene heater or a lamp or an old sick car with students in it too dumb
to know
not to try.
No time to write or think or curl my fingers around, a dove's leg curse or a jewel. Pierced, oh sure, like that a pinprick in an open sky, a babbling tower. Water from the sky from the ocean from the heart, clipped, triggered and muzzled, strapped to the enormity of it.
Colour-blind and balanced, capsized and immersed, a bridge that's a seething landscape.
Titan for a Tuesday, dry as a bone wrist or a Doll's house in the desert.
It smells like strength and vicissitude with only what you want and a cold turned spoke.
Staggering and with a head full full of light, only small acts of kindness,
what else is there to find for us silent at the edge of the day?
So then it's only you and me in a saturated blue, long kisses hard into each other
sweat and confirmation, an engine of conviction, a weapon of devolution.
A slow turning and immense mill with a lidless sacrifice and an angry wasp, pulled from one strung heart sharp over ribs.
There's only breath and life
and no promises from either, go guarantor for me that I'll be alone,
prove me right with skin that colour, hand that soft, a zealot with a placard walking in the rain.
Drama and faith are such poor excuses.
Only hints and grace, something gone, out into the soft and never ending night with a half-heard cry.
I'm sad for you, baby.
I know. I know.
I saw the tremors and the shadows in the kitchen.
Like leaves and seeds bent around a chain link fence on a quiet day.
It's only me, just me, that's all.
I can come and visit and hold your head up for you while you try and sing, like before with both hands that you pushed to my throat.
Wait for me, oh wait for me.
I know my arms are empty and ugly and I have hard edges and sway and rock and twitch twitch twitch and I'm sorry for all these things and for the old woman made up for no-one and for the beautiful girl so autistic she couldn't see and for the tiny mad child that I was
and for the tiny mad child that you were, dirty hands and sweet,
sweet,
bruised skin.
Twelve o'clock on a Friday night,
Run my hand down the side of my face. Crack each finger individually.

Give up, give in.

Whisper and kiss the side of my mouth.

Someplace or something warm.

It's okay.
It is.

Continued from THIS PAGE...

I would like to spend a week with you and just see how similar we are; just for once talk to you for long enough without being interrupted to know, maybe to just stop lying. Can you imagine that?

Coming to each other and saying:

"Well, today, I really thought about suicide, and I had to make myself eat even though it made me want to puke. I felt each step I took as a jarring blow of living hating fear. I spoke to other people… other creatures in the world even though my I could not find my breath and I gasped and clenched my uncertain weak fists, because I had to I had to and the rope the knife they swell rotten and sweet in every turn and thought and they live in the fear booming in my heart shivering through my feet as I step through the world...

“But I am alive and I have my hands before me and my scars are old. I have lied well enough to hide, for this time at least this night.

“I thought it took all the strength that I have to do these things, but it took more to them to you."

Honesty in life seems impossible, but it might not be between us.

The fallacy expands.

How often do you lie a day? Think about it.

When have you found anyone who can hold your hand and say, "I know how you feel," without that tiny worm one more time hissing wormy breathy words into your brain - that that is exactly the opposite of the truth: that this in itself shows you that you were wrong, once again, to whisper in their ear?

My resting pulse sits on around ninety five. It feels like my heart is going to explode whenever I get really excited. Makes it all the more authentic, really, don't you think?

I have all sorts of horrible little self-centred fixations, and my thumb constantly dances across the rest of my fingers kinda frantically, in my sleep too, I'm told. My more medically minded acquaintances tell me it's a frontal lobe thing.

I love when someone can throw something like that into a sentence and just destroy your day. It impresses me.

Yesterday I went out to buy some cigarettes, got distracted by something or frightened or lost or lost and frightened. I came home a couple of hours later to find that I had left the grill on, with the oven door closed. No really.

It did some pretty awful things to my nice clean kitchen. The glass door exploded.

There is glass in my bread. I can’t afford any more. I can’t afford a new door for the oven for the aliens I will never meet who own the house where I pretend to live.

Courage. Yes?

Ah well…

What you said. To me… your eyes wild, beyond real; impossible inhuman intensity. Match my own..? Well… did you mean it?

DID YOU MEAN IT?

It is beginning to get late and I am beginning to get drunk. This is bad. I have to pick my girlfriend up in about an hour, and there will almost definitely be a man in a tight fitting blue uniform with a moustache (why moustache why moustache?) wishing it was daytime so he could wear his reflective sunnies who is almost precisely twice my height standing on a corner with a breathaliser just squirming to ruin my night.

To protect the world from me just a little. Trying to be cool after speaking to you, I knocked over the iron and nearly set my hair on fire whilst lighting one of my extra strong will-give-you-cancer-even-if-you're-young-and-apathetic bad news delicious cigarettes among cigarettes.

Okay. What shall we do. (Note the cunning lack of rhetoric by not putting a question mark on the end of this sentence.)

Want to have an affair?

I want you, want to fuck you crippled and wasted as I am. I have seen your young hands and the nails are broken and bloody. I held them for those moments and the ferocity of your need left soft drying smears on my fingers.

If we can’t… if you are too broken... if we have to let that hunger that need slip from us like the years we have lost… oh no oh my love, no…

Skid sharp away from each other. Like the beauty that once preceded you; each step you took easing each door open before you. The arc of grace a hunched stagger etiolated by terror.

If we can’t… and it curls and curdles into unloveliness. Like the tight line of your frightened lips. Like the broken veins in my nose. Like our scars. Like my teeth, rotting from some obscure reaction to a psyche med.

Then hey… hey… maybe?

Let me? Let me paint you. As you were. As we were...

CONTINUED HERE

.

And here's the poem that is written into the piece: (please don't judge it by the fact that it's a POEM i know I probably would - and take the time to read it).

Watch hands on an ancient clock, slow but still moving. Clicking in the dark when there's no one home. Echoing in a hOh, fuck yeah, watch hands on an ancient clock, slow but still moving. Clicking in the dark when there's no one home. Echoing in a hall with light spilling in through the frosted glass.

Like when the game is over and it's time to hold and time to kill, the very very last drop of milk splashes onto the page and the very very dark blue moves in the corner. Walking with me to the end of the isle pewter cups full of thick liquid that catches in the back of your throat and makes you sputter like a fire or a kerosene heater or a lamp or an old sick car with students in it too dumb
to know
not to try.
No time to write or think or curl my fingers around, a dove's leg curse or a jewel. Pierced, oh sure, like that a pinprick in an open sky, a babbling tower. Water from the sky from the ocean from the heart, clipped, triggered and muzzled, strapped to the enormity of it.
Colour-blind and balanced, capsized and immersed, a bridge that's a seething landscape.
Titan for a Tuesday, dry as a bone wrist or a Doll's house in the desert.
It smells like strength and vicissitude with only what you want and a cold turned spoke.
Staggering and with a head full full of light, only small acts of kindness,
what else is there to find for us silent at the edge of the day?
So then it's only you and me in a saturated blue, long kisses hard into each other
sweat and confirmation, an engine of conviction, a weapon of devolution.
A slow turning and immense mill with a lidless sacrifice and an angry wasp, pulled from one strung heart sharp over ribs.
There's only breath and life
and no promises from either, go guarantor for me that I'll be alone,
prove me right with skin that colour, hand that soft, a zealot with a placard walking in the rain.
Drama and faith are such poor excuses.
Only hints and grace, something gone, out into the soft and never ending night with a half-heard cry.
I'm sad for you, baby.
I know. I know.
I saw the tremors and the shadows in the kitchen.
Like leaves and seeds bent around a chain link fence on a quiet day.
It's only me, just me, that's all.
I can come and visit and hold your head up for you while you try and sing, like before with both hands that you pushed to my throat.
Wait for me, oh wait for me.
I know my arms are empty and ugly and I have hard edges and sway and rock and twitch twitch twitch and I'm sorry for all these things and for the old woman made up for no-one and for the beautiful girl so autistic she couldn't see and for the tiny mad child that I was
and for the tiny mad child that you were, dirty hands and sweet,
sweet,
bruised skin.
Twelve o'clock on a Friday night,
Run my hand down the side of my face. Crack each finger individually.

I would like to spend a week with you and just see how similar we are; just for once talk to you for long enough without being interrupted to know, maybe to just stop lying. Can you imagine that?

"Well, today, I really thought about suicide, and I had to make myself eat even though it made me want to puke. I felt each step I took as a jarring blow of living hating fear. I spoke to other people… other creatures in the world even though my I could not find my breath and I gasped and clenched my uncertain weak fists, because I had to I had to and the rope the knife they swell rotten and sweet in every turn and thought and they live in the fear booming in my heart shivering through my feet as I step through the world...

“But I am alive and I have my hands before me and my scars are old. I have lied well enough to hide, for this time at least this night.

“I thought it took all the strength that I have to do these things, but it took more to them to you."

When have you found anyone who can hold your hand and say, "I know how you feel," without that tiny worm one more time hissing wormy breathy words into your brain - that that is exactly the opposite of the truth: that this in itself shows you that you were wrong, once again, to whisper in their ear?

My resting pulse sits on around ninety five. It feels like my heart is going to explode whenever I get really excited. Makes it all the more authentic, really, don't you think?

I have all sorts of horrible little self-centred fixations, and my thumb constantly dances across the rest of my fingers kinda frantically, in my sleep too, I'm told. My more medically minded acquaintances tell me it's a frontal lobe thing.

I love when someone can throw something like that into a sentence and just destroy your day. It impresses me.

Yesterday I went out to buy some cigarettes, got distracted by something or frightened or lost or lost and frightened. I came home a couple of hours later to find that I had left the grill on, with the oven door closed. No really.

It did some pretty awful things to my nice clean kitchen. The glass door exploded.

There is glass in my bread. I can’t afford any more. I can’t afford a new door for the oven for the aliens I will never meet who own the house where I pretend to live.

What you said. To me… your eyes wild, beyond real; impossible inhuman intensity. Match my own..? Well… did you mean it?

It is beginning to get late and I am beginning to get drunk. This is bad. I have to pick my girlfriend up in about an hour, and there will almost definitely be a man in a tight fitting blue uniform with a moustache (why moustache why moustache?) wishing it was daytime so he could wear his reflective sunnies who is almost precisely twice my height standing on a corner with a breathaliser just squirming to ruin my night.

To protect the world from me just a little. Trying to be cool after speaking to you, I knocked over the iron and nearly set my hair on fire whilst lighting one of my extra strong will-give-you-cancer-even-if-you're-young-and-apathetic bad news delicious cigarettes among cigarettes.

Okay. What shall we do. (Note the cunning lack of rhetoric by not putting a question mark on the end of this sentence.)

I want you, want to fuck you crippled and wasted as I am. I have seen your young hands and the nails are broken and bloody. I held them for those moments and the ferocity of your need left soft drying smears on my fingers.

If we can’t… if you are too broken... if we have to let that hunger that need slip from us like the years we have lost… oh no oh my love, no…

Skid sharp away from each other. Like the beauty that once preceded you; each step you took easing each door open before you. The arc of grace a hunched stagger etiolated by terror.

If we can’t… and it curls and curdles into unloveliness. Like the tight line of your frightened lips. Like the broken veins in my nose. Like our scars. Like my teeth, rotting from some obscure reaction to a psyche med.