simonhlilly

DECADENT LINGERIE (dream stream)

Perhaps it was
the early sun,
The night sun,
Or the slim,
low dark moon.

But the halls
and chambers within,
The tales
and stuttered songs,
Were filled with dark
And strange, literate beings.

Wild, bohemian,
relics and collectors
Of the mythic
and the mundane.
A dream full
of forbidden rooms,
Reckless draperies,
swathed velvets,
Lascivious elegance,
experimental liaisons.

Good to see
the corridors of my mind
Disreputable and inhabited,
The forgotten,
the unfashionable,
Breeding experiences
Like there were no
Tomorrow.

Sculpting options,
Reviewing gestures,
Collecting ephemera.

Busy before the moral,
Busybody day curtailed
And manacled these lush
And poisonous flowers,
Slain by opprobrium…..

A very lush dream sequence. Dream buildings always carry a strong atmosphere. They are, after all, the dreamers represention of ‘self’ in some way. My own tend to self-construct around one of a few core architectures, based on real structures, elaborated or morphed together.
One is based on the classic Edinburgh tenamant. A stony, cavernous dimly lit open stone staircase leading up an unholy number of steps, on each landing, two doorways facing each other. The majority are 19th century constructions, so have an inner hall ( in my dream architecture this tends to be a large, square space with a confusing number of closed doors) leading to a variety of high-ceiling rooms with plaster mouldings….
Crossing the Meadows
Frosty autumn morning
Smell of barley and hops:
The brewery down
West End way.
Pale sunlight,
Pale water.
The loom of
Castle Rock.

More often, I construct a space cobbled together from my first flat in Birmingham. A solitary, disreputable maze of a building, again Victorian in construction, in a once elegant, turned seedy, part of town. Split into a bewildering Gormenghast of flats and bedsits inhabited by borderline lunatics, outcasts and keep-themselves-to-themselvers, in my dream constructions it sprouts an unlikely number of split levels, long, thin rooms, rusty balconies that overhang dark, deserted gardens. It breeds a nest of dark, vaguely familiar roads around it….
There is a place of
Poetry there,
Dark,
Colour of dust
And dried blood.
A place of confusions,
Lost directions,
Relict.

Most often, those inner spaces are based on Bridge Street Studios, an inner city canal warehouse complex ( probably now developed into expensive waterside penthouse flats), but when I was there many of the floors, abandoned by East Asian fabric manufacturing companies, had been taken over as the largest and cheapest (hottest, coldest, leakiest) artists’ studios in Birmingham. Divided up by partitions, often ghost towns of creativity, large open floors, huge windows, minimal electricity, always the risk of calamitous waterpipe bursts in cold winters. Again, a multitude of floors, a welter of staircases..
A place of exhibition
A place of seeking out
A hideout, a stakeout
A gathering of unlike minds
A flock of outliers
Dust,perfume,turpentine,
Dead leaves
Blown in,
Collected,
Collected.

Then there is the occassional tasteful Jungian set. A church or cathedral, often with internal growths of trees or other plant forms.. Which brings to mind a particular windswept . island dream, saint’s relics, boats leaving ( always leaving).

A fascination:
How,
From nowhere
Memory of an old dream
Jumps in,
Flavours with mood
Then scinters away
Drawing no conclusions…

Photographs are from Chichester Cathedral, Ranga Hotel Iceland, traditional Japanese house, Yamanashi, Japan

Not sure if “scinters” was a word, but it is now! ( meaning: fragments, disintegrates, dissolves, flakes off, splinters, etc.)

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