Down from the mountain, we trade myths like
bubblegum cards: floods, famines, arbitrary judgments,
and disproportionate revenge. You change water into
wine and I change the desert into a shaded balcony in
an Art Deco skyscraper. (My kind of town.) I wear
tinted spectacles to hide my charcoal eyes as I lay out
my years as a smouldering boy plummeting from a
burning sky, a domestic Lucifer hell-bent on breaking
apart. You are an archetype for me to misinterpret, your
elegant dress plumped with snakes and apples. (If I
could just remember …) These roles, we know, are
only temporary: mutation is metamorphosis for the
modern masses and change can’t be arrested, whatever
its alleged crimes. What we believed was a mountain
was just the monkey bars in the playground. (I am still
a small boy, falling.) What we believed were myths
were just monstrous lies. We sit apart, sipping tepid tea
and reassessing who we might be in the light of
emerging data. I’m an open book with illegible script;
you’re a lone bubble rising in a chilled flute. We scan
our apps and check our messages, deleting demands
from fickle gods. (I’m laying my cards on the table.)
There’s nothing up my sleeve but basalt and the stumps
of feathers.
Bio:
Oz Hardwick is a European prose poet, whose next collection, A Census of Preconceptions, will be published by SurVision Books in 2022. With Anne Caldwell, he edited The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry (Valley Press, 2019) and Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2022). Oz is Professor of Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University.