by Iain Collier-Webb

Artwork by Liz Chiu

We arrived with the sky. Or was it the sea?
Five senses in places devoid
of a decade, some point on a compass. Resigned

to some kind of microbial life
in a mise en scene without meaningful signs. We
did not speak

of the cost of bread. Or the clench of the fist
of our self-disgust. All wires
were tapped by the poem police. We

believed we perceived, through
the smoke of the screen
of the window pane, triumphant pigeons

preening and perched
on the claws and teeth
of a chloroformed cat. An intrepid explorer,

arrived with the dawn,
in the dead of the night, to scratch-
and-sniff and vacuum pack, the

artefacts found at the wildest
frontiers of Aesthetic thought. The
uncharted terrains of a navel’s fluff.