Untitled

Words and Photo by Max Lees

The hunting party sets out Into the mudsucking swamp stumbling through

thick fog and shooting at answers to a question they’re still looking for Carrying black-and-white binoculars, chanting to a twobeat stomp chasing ghosts and waving excitedly at some object in the distance conjured by their burning gaze, blink

and it slips back out of existence They’re looking for a bridge, loosely strung across the chasm between the blizzard and the bonfire, careful crossing open-eyed or you’ll drop your sanity down there, Down where your own dead body and the bodies of your shadow’s friends are twisted into incoherent shapes, inside out and multiplied in bizarre attempts at circular symmetry Look up or look down,

the high-wire bridge gives a sickening lurch and in a fit of laughter you find yourself tossed back into the flames, surrounded by piles of junk, gold frames cheap paint costumes snagged on broken strings magazines with

glossy covers a gramophone that doesn’t play movie film and high-heeled shoes vintage photos endless colours The flames go on singing and dancing and burning while the snowstorm blows relentlessly in deafening silence, Out in the blizzard there’s a throne for a familiar corpse frozen, staring blankly as if he might still blurt out the secret of the cold wind written in the stars, as if he might just spring up and take us to the bridge that doesn’t exist, as if by keeping his eyes in a pickle jar we could use them as goggles and the universe would rearrange itself as a kaleidoscope of straight lines calculated from a single centre point So we run the other way, jump headfirst into the flames of our own creation which we insist were always there, as if there are no stars but in paintings and no vast expanse of nothingness, banging our heads together to drown out the silence, drawing new bridges and magic staircases,

Digging for a holy grail that sinks deeper the longer we search, dancing on tiptoes on the edge of an imaginary crevice, endlessly painting pictures that we will not finish until ice burns without melting and rivers run both ways, until the tower of I topples and the empire of eyes turns inwards, until the bridge collapses and nausea turns to laughter, until dead men lay to rest and flowers bloom from their ashes, until we lose the key and its black box, until we learn to feel our way through the blinding grey area between the artist

and its playground