Paul Murphy

Man Has His Proper Place in Nature 

After Mary Shelley

(sound of thunder)
 
Shake it into life; this science of living bodies.
Minerva re-entry black like Hegel’s black tomb.
Whiter than the downward diamond; we know we won’t die.
We’re living bodies, shaking into more life.
 
Undid the sequined dress, reflective underwear, legs akimbo.
You were seduced by the lights of Neukolln;
Clad on the foreshore, carcasses of crusty sturgeon,
The big-lipped Russian intimated: leeches; lamprey.
 
Igor, you are not writing a work
On carbon monoxide, an ex-Para
Come home from the wars.  Worse still
Clothed in Totalitarian monotone.
 
Your experimenter is an artwork of camouflage
Sergei, Ivan, two of the raw pigments in your cloth.
The whole is a tank disguised, a rank of ‘copters
Or a lakeside view of the once Sea of Azov.
 
I knew them all, their fabularies too;
Their rancid aquarium, filled with minging Persian sturgeon.
They desired to bathe in cavier
But they can’t know.  We’ve shaken all our lives.
 
Are shaking still.  (sound effects)  I served
Like the stain of infatuation; can’t fuck, can’t dance.
Better now, but I’m shaking still.
Why does this fucking sturgeon fill the room?
 
It’s shaken too by the galvanic energy
That’s all around us.  Electric convulsive sturgeon
So smug, so self-assured.  Severe yet trite.

A lightning gleam in nature’s little black piggy eye.
Why are you asking me to dance? I won’t have
Sex with you. I’ve got taste, black tie sturgeon.

Paul Murphy's Booklet, Alone in the Back Cafe, has just been published by Survivors' Press (ISBN 978-1-874595-14-3), at £4+£1 p&p. This poem was written subsequent to that collection.