Artwork: Act 8 by Gill Robinson
Act 8
Gina Wisker
In the hall of multiple mirrors
Who can determine the criminal or the crime
Culpable as you face away
Culpable under the spotlight
Launched into film
No longer possible to be just
A recorder or an audience
Is it scripted ?
Could we see it coming?
Curtains
screens
Round every corner
Round each of us
Only desolation
Destruction
Chaos
The potential to drown.
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Artwork: Untitled by Gill Robinson
Stasis
Gina Wisker
Sleeping beauty
with no
body
and only the fairy story
Of waking.
Cobwebs and stasis.
Somewhere it’s all forbidden.
Light.
The time before the
impossible to invest in
time
thereafter.
Theatrical positioning
in an empty space.
The absence of the human
the moving forward
the hopeful.
Limited.
Removed.
It’s all still there outside.
Even the coyotes
return to the Golden Gate.
Somewhere some are
oblivious to what’s yet to lose.
Everything.
But only silence and absence
continue.
Locking us down and out
pausing it all
is just like holding your breath
for the many to pass.
For some and for others
It
drips away what’s left.
The limited, the
posed,
the emptied out.
The silent stage
of the no longer
everyday.
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The Lost Year
Gina Wisker
This is the lost year,
the year indoors, the year
boundaried tighter and tighter by park,
garden,
window.
Outside, the ground frozen hard,
the birds begin to sing again early,
claiming their space.
Crocuses remind of the cycle
which soon begins a second year.
Not quite lost.
Of course.
Those who avoided the inadvertent meetup
with a carrier in a supermarket,
turning round, clutching their first bag of flour,
or queuing in your doorway for fancy bread.
Will be fine. Or not.
For I to you and you to me, we all are suspect.
Some were coughing on the basketball court.
One was handing you, smiling, an amazon parcel
of more toilet rolls.
They’d somehow found your door,
your number.
Those who stepped aside at the right moment
will crank into March 2021,
sceptical of liberating cure-alls.
Astonished at losses.
Hoping for summer beyond the gates.
Still feeding the birds.
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