Sometimes it takes a long time

But be not afraid or downhearted

Like the Celtic day, starts at dusk

And their year, as winter starts

Growth begins in darkness

And, disembodied,

A growth contained

In an others body

A cell

Then two

Then four

Geometric progression

Grains of rice doubling on a chess board

Until a space is filled

The Blastosphere

A yoke sack, an anus and a mouth

A literal visceral vesica pescis

A vessel

A fish

A body of water in water

A boundary and nothing more

It is, and is becoming

Some thing

A boy

A man in body only

In me is spirit

Sexless, disembodied

I don’t care about my pronoun

I am it, he, we

I am legion

I am no thing

Nowhere

And everywhere

My body lets me speak, and act and reproduce

But I am discombobulated, dissociated

Disinterested really in bodies, even my own

And, enjoying inhabiting this mans body yet

I would love to inhabit a woman’s body

Or a fish or a cloud or a body of water

To find out more about consciousness

To remember, after being a mole

About being blind in blackness digging in my garden

So instead I embody things in

The intelligence of materials

Paper, or ink, or words on a page

And speech

To make the air vibrate

In your ear.

---

About Gestate

This was written for performance. It was a thing that fell out of me and was very personal and was quite an important trail marker on my art as an adventure and research trail. Often artform preempts material emerging into consciousness. It kind of acts like an alchemical process and distils down lots of raw material then allows the product to float up to the surface. In art making this is sometimes called percolation. I call it incubation. But different words for the same thing. Regards this website, it says a lot about what art as research feels like. Regards me, it revealed some personal stuff that was emerging for me.

It is also about poetry and art making and what art therapist Pat B Allen here and here calls, spiritual technology, the latter descriptor being consciously and deliberately and accurately oxymoronic.

As performance, the poem was designed to be heard and not read. So below is the poem as spoken word.

Gestate