after Frank Auerbach’s ‘Interior Vincent Terrace’

Let’s start with a piece of furniture
– say a table
or chair or bed –
add some figures
have them doing something
– making love, quarrelling, misconducting
themselves –
have me enter with the desire
to hang myself

like a lantern
from your ceiling
in the warm wet lung
of Vincent Terrace
that room     that awful yellow

the colour of unlove
bronchial patterns on the walls
       picture our life
as a cardboard box

now try to imagine
           the top lifted off