There's so much ceiling in here
And the light falls onto me in squares
Soles squeaking on the floorboards I must stop focusing on my feet
Leicester square sings a little in the background
But mostly there is the sound of all this space
A few faces that smile sarcastically to the wall
It's quite a rigid place to be seeing dead things living in
You don't think my trainers are solemn enough
I wish that I could run my fingers over that canvas
Or take it off the wall and see behind
Isn't it futile to place all your earnest
Into a piece of paper as if it could hold it?
As if it could even come close
As if this room the size of a house could hold it
As if we would notice if it did
I push my chin back and tense my stomach
To delete my anterior pelvic tilt
And then I just keep looking
There's a person stood or sat in every corner
I'm sure they have so much to say
But they look on with their censor sat inside their mouths
I catch my hands cupped together behind my back
And know their address is working
Quiet nodding into the room is insufficient to announce myself
I do love it in here
Something about stop, look, read, in rhythm
Gold frames my forgetting that I'm supposed to hate anything at all
And it's working
It's been minutes since I last remembered all those questions
It's then I notice how I shrink myself and I become colder
And the distance buzz of outside is my followed alibi
I hold the room in like a breath and then I let it go again
I hope that one day we lift that glass
Outside in the daylight I regain a decade or so
Kicked a can right up to a bin
And dropped it in as though I owned the place
Pillars of the sun laid down
But they weren't asleep they were just looking up
When the form is fixed there is so much space to fill with feeling
But it was precisely the forgetting of the room
Which gifted me one so seductively abstruse
There is all this collision and context out here
There are no hands to hold the object
Only parts and no resolution
All these lives becoming certain only in that they never can be
To understand the scene, we must look at the door
The way it peels and the wood is right there in the open
Handle made of bridge
It's opening proves itself and proves itself wrong
Until the two aren't differentials
We become so involuted that to observe that painting without precedent
Might be all we have left of candour
I'm stood with one foot in each partition so my body knows neither
I'm writing the outside in but vocabulary fails me at the threshold
I'm holding words under my tongue that haven't been written yet
The framed and the otherwise denounce the gallery in unison
By continuing to exist just a few yards away from each other