Stairway I

By Paul D Robertson



Oils, 140 x 90 cms.

My ex, Kirsty, and her friend, Jen. They were kind enough to pose for me together...



Do you feel as I do?

My brothers and sisters?

Deviants and mutants and freaks and angels? - does it move you like this.

Like - THIS?

It swings and burns and riots inside me sometimes - sudden tastes uncertain and anomalous - each sense fitted up and mis-wired with invention.
Show me that synchronous similitude: Following Orpheus as he follows Eurydice into the dark. The dark that I have been sucking, gulping into me since I first lifted my wide wide gaze to the moon. Rising ancient and cold. Eating darkness and it tastes....

Human like you, yes!

Let me exist as you, I want to sear your mind show me where you hide your kindness so that I can rip it from you with my red real teeth.
Sad and soft sounds sticking in my throat, in the softness behind my words. Behind my panicked, violently blue eyes.
I once…

I made a man cry with my work –

Triggers in his own bruising mind clipping sore and real and true.
A strong man and brave. A man… my oldest friend; he whom I have not never seen shed tears. Not in twenty hard years of the hard corners of a brutal and difficult life. He has healed himself now. He is in love with his wife. He would kill and die for me…
Women and men have shed tears at my work.
They have I have seen them I was there I saw I saw and my memory is quick sometimes and it frightens me with clarity so sharp and real.

I trace the path of their tears in the air before me.

AND I ALMOST SOB.
Stop it. Stop it stop it. The emotion, unnameable, is colossal impossible.
Stop.
Deep breath, try. Shudder once more. My own tears hot on my cheek. Sip something cool, open a fucking window? Put the kettle on again forget put it on again forget and remember that I have done this twice and limp back to my work. I stand. I twist my strong, deft hands against each other.

I fail without simple answers, stuttering ambiguities sincere and desperate. A gasp of longing slips from my tongue flicking outwards from my undecided lips like a creaking leather whip.
Calloused and scared and still and always smeared (STILL YES! WHY I CAME IN HERE! REMEMBERED YAY!)with paint. It is so beautiful.

It frightens me.
I step numb to the bathroom twist taps in unfeeling slippery fingers paint. It makes things…hard to grasp. Hah! Puns rule…

Shock and cold and it tastes so sweet and I could drink such water as this, forever cool. False insectile legs pricking my skin even as I scrub it, prickling through my hair.
I pour clear cold water in a winding trail down my back and hold my head under the tap for as long as I can bear.
Oh, to find a baptism such as this - at the hands of one so replete with belief that what they may have been disintegrates before the throb of divine insistence. Baptised by a drowning.
For this act, to find faith in warm human hands… In some symbol ancient and quivering with the force of certainty. With fucking CERTAINTY (“doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one” – Voltaire, the wily old bastard). With faith.
Measured in millions of long dead believers embraced in the sweet surety of ritual - beneath the crying cup.
Dust strewn under hard, calloused hands. Angels? And dust? We must be both! Concentrate!
As the cool water runs over the yielding welcome of my eyelids.
The last and least peace that I can find.
My own faith… zealot of nothingness, disciple of CHANCE. Rhapsodist in ephemeral accident so pure its coldness burns.
I hear the hiss of the plumbing, the booming blood surging in my ears. I breathe some rushing strand of the water and cough hard. Enough.
I bang my head, on the tap, even as it vibrates to my sight in the tricking slight of hand of mild hallucination.
Only me. Shiver and shake. Force out each claw into a supple human finger, nails painted deep sapphire blue. They are calloused from my guitar, still stained with my paint and sore from the incessant scrape of life at their raw nerves searing just under the skin.
Squint and glare at my reflection. Snarls have always just looked completely silly on my face. I must smile. Smile smile. The shape of the bone, the skull, under the gums.
The sink is covered in paint. Faucets young but obsolescent. Plastic decay matching my own.
Flick my hair back just so and water sprays lightly. It seems to fall in jerky staccato accelerations and infinitesimal pauses. Some of the drops on my open palm. They roll and rattle into each other like flawless crystal marbles before dissolving into water once more.
This. Endless. Endless. Impossibility… this mammoth UNNAMED and Unnameable emotion. That my senses distort when I must see to work to breathe to work see to paint to live.
It is so heavy. I want it and hate it and crave a name for its crippling mass upon my heart.
For now…
Trick it with beauty. Paint. Be brave. Courage my friends, my siblings, my lovers.
Angels and dust.

Concentrate!





"Where I am I don’t know, I can’t know. In the silence, you won’t know, you’ll never know; I must go on, I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”
Beckett.