Five
This is definitely not what the human body was designed to do. This.
This moment when the camera and the sheep meet. And perhaps
The little house at the bottom of the valley knows something about it
Too? The ruin with the smile and the two shining eyes? Who lives there? The Russian tenant
Of a violent Dog-Diogenes? A hunter stripping down naked to the badger,
To get inside its mind-sett, to prod the uncomprehending lion with a stick,
A horse’s-head handle to make it speak? Eating earthworms or worming their way
Into casts of thousands, animal farms, afternoon cartoons, creature comforts, biting their audiences, they come
Tied at the foot and neck, dressed in strips of meat to the ram market and the balance sheet,
The circle of investors like flukes in a rat piece about smell and choice.
‘I look aggressive, but I’m not really’, ‘I’m kind of awkward, I can’t see well’.
They get very slippery: this whole thing about so-called morals; animals are control-freaks.
The skin work of The Perverts, their psychology is often, casually, alien or animal,
Arto Spectaculo impersonates the animal inside, protagonists like priests,
While skin work is a specialist skill, when the animal has four legs, especially,
A million animals died to make one artist a billionaire, finance stitched to biology,
I like banking and banking likes me, Charlie the Clown offers a range of themed events,
Including Dinosaurs and Rain-Forest Animals, but you, you don’t
Look like you’re pretending, you look like a book
About leucistic crows published by other birds, you appear as a fragile super hero
In Kick-Ass goggles, red soles and black knee pads, offering your white bones
To the folds of the purply-brown mountain: Sheepwoman, Sheepthing, The Flocking,
Agnus of Wallia, The White Fleece, Woolly Avenger, Deep Sheep, Creeping Angel,
Harbinger of the Hill. The wrist cannot tell the rock, the rock cannot tell the wrist.
The designer and the blob, the mechanic and the camera, gristle and distance.
Representations that are not how they feel, not how you think, but
How you must be, how everything must be, must be well, well must be.