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