Photography: Trev Eales
Dancers with Arcade Fire
Diego Rivera couldn’t have crowded this out
so well as you. You took this slice – as
one man takes a photograph of the back
of your moment – and went in fast.
Everything that could record – including
human memory – was recording. It
might have been rehearsed. Huge
on the screens or distanced in matchbox
recognition, musicians were soundtracking
our every move, and we all raised our arms,
empty-handed, or gripped electronics to
trap this glitter in the snap of their jaws.
The Flaming Lips
Glitter blitz where hands brush the wind
wipes sound from the stage, back
into cavities of these bodies echoing between notes.
Smoke gushes, closing down escape routes,
senses turning back onto themselves, eyes
reversing to face pure light.
The gong
will
finally take us out of our senses.
La Fura dels Baus
To face the faceless mannequin
is to face the blind spots of time
If this is on his laptop, then we’ve
leapt from the laps of the gods
all of us with our long black gloves
welcoming the outerpersonal future
Robert Sheppard is a poet, who lives in Liverpool, UK. His most recent publication is Hap: Understudies of Thomas Wyatt's Petrarch from Knives, Forks and Spoons Press. His selected poems, History or Sleep, is available from Shearsman, which also publish The Robert Sheppard Companion, edited by James Byrne and Christopher Madden. 'Charms and Glitter', is due for book publication in January 2020, from Knives Forks and Spoons. Robert Sheppard met Trev Eales at a Thin Lizzy concert in Norwich in 1974. Sheppard blogs at www.robertsheppard.blogspot.
