Three Poems
Stand Magazine
After Searching Francis Bacon Pope
Facebook is the top
hit when you Google
the word ‘face’ and people go their
whole lives not
knowing the process between pig
and bacon
you can watch. it on YouTube how the bellies are slung skin-down on a conveyer belt and jabbed with metal teeth and how they are swung in a hot red room
Wikipedia’s definition for ‘face’ is the second hit where there is a photo of a woman smiling and a man with wrinkles and some pencilled sketches of how a face develops in the womb
there are not any pictures of crying faces or screaming faces with their dull black mouths
After David Hockney’s The Seven Stone Weakling
The act of looking is weirdly exposing and the small
straight lines above your head say that you think so too
because you’re looking at those joggers with their ‘jogger bums’
which are heading into a smooth white wall
and which are also heading into a wide endlessness
and as you look at them you are looking at yourself
and the red of the tree is central park in autumn
and the red of the tree is your neck getting hot your hands
clasped as if you are trying to hide behind
your own body and the line that would indicate the back
of one of the jogger’s legs is missing just beneath the right cheek
as if you have sucked it away with your eyes to keep
forever and I am looking at you with the lines on my head
and watching the blank spaces where the front of your legs should be
how the shade of your trousers exposes your invisible shins like a light
revealing something that isn’t there.
The People on Dinner Date Are Actually Paintings by Giuseppe Arcimboldo
because his efforts in a relationship are pastry on an onion tart and her adventure in the bedroom is chilli powder in a beef rendang, their bums are peaches and their dicks a prossecco bottle being popped open, their cheeks fishcakes and shop-bought sweet chilli sauce in their tear ducts. They have BBQ ribs under their shirts and their stomachs are a pork loin stuffed with apricots and rolled in Parma ham. And when they ask each other what do you get up to when you’re not at work? Toasted pine nuts fall out of their mouths and if I turn my head they change as if they’re saying: Look! I’m a lawyer/a librarian/a cook and then like: Look! I’m a plate of fried meat being uncovered by a set of hands.