Stuart McPherson: a poem

Beautifully Coloured Taiwanese Film

“...all my life, I have believed... if I mind my own business, no one would pay attention to me” Rob Jabbaz

It's easier to sleep than it is to photograph the world. Wring out the sun, its saturates. Bleed meadowsweet into brackish water on the backs of rolling carp. They tell me everything about stillness; about grace. About the gap between life on the first floor and death on the second; between work and watching life grow and blossom in a whitish pink. Burst star. Burst Magnolia. Violence, which is freedom: a bright appley red warmed under lighting. The effervescent sop of soaking in all the places never knowingly seen. I take another picture, hide myself within its greyscale acetate, hide behind the absent tints to float again above the scented cotton of an uncomfortable bed. Someday, something will have to give. Some things will have to be put away. Some things unfinished, half written in ink by a horse bristle brush.

Stuart McPherson is a poet living near Leicester, UK. Recent poems have appeared in Butcher’s Dog Magazine, Poetry Wales, Anthropocene, and Icefloe Press. His debut pamphlet Pale Mnemonic was published by Legitimate Snack in April 2021. The pamphlet Waterbearer was published in December 2021 by Broken Sleep Books. A debut full length collection Obligate Carnivore was published by Broken Sleep Books in August 2022.