POW! WOW! WHAT’S THIS?!

Susan Broadhurst, author of Liminal Acts

writes that my work challenges what performance is

and at the same time interrogating liminality

meaning the ‘in-between’

 

For me, the window is a liminal threshold

that is neither private nor entirely public

 

When I was around 15 or 16,

I slept with a glass jar on a table by my bedside

Inside lived my two eyeballs

How did this happen I hear you ask?
Well, let’s go back to the early Nineties,

to a suburb in South London

 

My two eyeballs hanging on the wall

My two eyeballs hanging on the wall

           

One day, walking home from school
I looked up at No. 22 Englefield Road SW12

and saw a face looking out of a bedroom window
The face was the boy who every morning

caught the same bus no 256 as I did to school 
He was on his way to Central Saint Martin’s art college

where I myself one day wanted to be
I remember his dark eyes and short dark hair 
His corduroy coat and red Adidas trainers 

Was he looking out of the bedroom window at me I wonder
As if to say ‘hello’? 
Or was it purely just to look out?
I always sat behind him on the bus
And looked out of the window across the early morning skyline 
across the residential streets of Balham at dawn
From the top deck seat I always sat in 
This dreamy luminescent landscape of this city I love

 

My two eyeballs hanging on the wall

My two eyeballs hanging on the wall

And if one of those eyeballs should accidentally fall      

One day, looking at the boy sitting in front of me,

a ray of sunlight momentarily caught one side

of his face as he smiled,

POW! WOW! WHAT’S THIS?!

Lee-boy first experience physical transcendence

Moment of fleeting bliss

Don’t why or how, but know right now

wanna give him a bit fat Lee-boy kiss

Penetrating through the cornea to the antechamber

right through to the lens, narrowly avoiding the pupil

and then entering retina

this boy’s beauty, blinded me

My eyeballs ripped from their sockets

Orbits cut loose

Decapitated from optic nerve

 

My two little disembodied eyeballs

landed on the floor and started rolling around

making their way down the top deck floor

then down the stairs of the bus, past the bus driver

making their way out through the door of the bus

Luckily the driver stopped the bus just before he ran them over,

And I could pick them up and put them in my P.E bag,

wrap them up in my shower towel,

and place carefully amongst my football boots

and Lynx deodorant

 

Many years later, I was visiting a friend in his artist studio 
He had dark eyes and short dark hair
And a corduroy coat and red Adidas trainers
It then dawned on me as I looked out of his studio window

across the early evening skyline 
across the residential streets of Balham at dusk

maybe he in fact was the boy at the window 
I never asked him, I never dare
I wonder, ‘what if?’

it can be a small world if you dream big.

 

My two eyeballs hanging on the wall

My two eyeballs hanging on the wall

And if both those eyeballs should accidentally fall