Nathan Thompson

Circus Song

I am at the mercy of the acrobat, who is pushing his juggernaut of a body high on paint-fumes and sawdust. My pupils swell when his trapeze approaches and freeze when he recedes. They are soon filling the big top, bursting at the guide-ropes erected to quell a neat full moon underfoot.

Finally the acrobat throws a bow and casts off his body for the collective funeral of clowns who follow. They are yawning like dumbstruck children approaching the night they realise their father is one day going to die. A howl chairs their coarse-haired committee with spirit-gum and among them is a monster who is smiling, his drift-wood face gathering in the evening like suffragettes huddled in unlikely places for a dress-rehearsal.

My dry eye is rolled up in the house and runs to a negative order, because of the many things not to want on a high-wire. Silk is expensive. It shines with the surface tension of cats’ eyes.

Missing Mary-Jane

Mary-Jane is obsessed with the corners of my eyes. “Where did you get them, the corners of your eyes?” she’d say if she could.

“You know, Mary-Jane,” I splutter one day, as young men do, “I wish you’d stop staring at me like that, with the whites around your irises. It makes me feel all godless and nondenominational.”

She would stroke my bald patch if she could. The underside of a breeze sucks up its moisture.

“Your problem is you try to combine a capitalist progression with communist values. The resulting discord, should you ever sound it, would undo 4 minutes 33. You are a vandal, but you do not practise enough for it to ever happen.” That’s the sort of thing Mary-Jane used to say.

Mary-Jane used to be good at diagnosing spiritual crises. There is such elegance under her thoughts, like a diving bell.