Analysis

All I can do is
tell the truth. No that isn’t
so – I have missed it.

There is no truth that
in passing through awareness
does not lie.

But one runs after it all the same.

From the preface to The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis by Jacques Lacan. By Marika Rose.

On the Angel

Get into these streets
these people
this glorious ark;
this joy, this spirit
this towering pride.

Get into the day
the evening
the night.
Into the heart
Into the life.

Get into your city
Get into my city
Get into Newcastle.

Audio advert on the 21 “Angel” bus between Durham and Gateshead, July 2010. By Marika Rose.

Three words

I’ve got seven
kids. The three
words you hear
most around my
house are ‘hello’,
‘goodbye’ and
‘I’m pregnant.’

Dean Martin quoted in the Guardian Family section, 7 August 2010. By Marika Rose.

Wake

The whole tribe is better off
if someone is up all the night,
listening for a lion
walking through the grass.

From The Crow of the Early Bird, 27 March 2005.

Commatose

The Board is mindful
of the guidelines produced
by the Association
of British Insurers
and the attention being given
to CSR issues
by investors and wider
stakeholder communities.
The Board acknowledges
the commercial and ethical importance
of the development and maintenance
of a culture of continuous improvement
in CSR matters
as far as they are relevant
to the Group’s activities
and accepts that
the implementation of a system
for measuring and reporting
on key CSR indicators
may, over time, be appropriate.

From Harvard International’s Corporate Responsibility statement, 28 June 2010.

Sea State

Humber Thames Dover Wight
Plymouth North Biscay
Portland. Smooth or slight.
Variable three or four. Fair.

Moderate or good,
Occasionally poor later.

From the UK Shipping Forecast, 22 June 2010. By Nathan Lechler.

Hepaticous

And then you’re in an operating room,
Staring deep
Into a stellate smash of livid liver.

It oozes discontinuous destruction.
Fragments of hepatic mush are strewn
And coddled among clots of blood,
Stained with bile and mixed with stool.
The beauty of the enzyme pathways is nowhere to be seen;

Dr. Krebs is not in the building.
Weak indeed is the capsule holding it all in,
split apart like broiled bratwurst.
How little it takes!

From Dr Schwab’s Brittle Beauty. By Jim.

Sawbones

I will reach in gently and caress the liver,
the stomach and spleen.
Slide over the top,
into the recesses,
curl the fingers enough to sense the texture,
the fullness.
The bowels move away and under,
and over the top as I direct my hand.
I can describe your kidneys now,
I’ve circled the top of your rectum,
held your uterus,
measured your ovaries between my fingers.
Part of you is gone at the moment,
but I’m here,
I know you now.
You trusted and let me in,
you opened your belly to me,
and I entered with force.
I’ll stay until it’s right.
It’s what I must do.
You think you’ll never touch me so
intimately as I’ve touched you.
But you have.
You have.

From Taking Trust on Surgeonsblog, 7 October 2006. By Marika Rose.

The Eye in Time

Keen lemon-yellow
Hurts the eye in time
As a prolonged and shrill trumpet-note
The ear.

Or white
Conveys a harmony of silence
Which works upon us negatively
Like many pauses in music
That break
Temporarily
The Mel-

-ody.

Kandinsky, quoted in ‘Music and Jugendstil’, Critical Enquiry, Autumn 1990. By Kate Guthrie.