Dan FEATHERSTON
Brothers Quay
1.
Maze of alleys, mirrors, dimly lit shop windows.
An oversized head's craft of ravaged plaster.
Eye's liquid wobble, dandelion clock brain.
Ice cube's frame-by-frame to say a window
stuffed with steel wool, ping pong balls.
Anamorphic reindeer.
Bullet fixed in one testicle.
Really all this sublime belief no one's complicity
in furtive glances & choreographed shadows
shifting a palimpsest of music, literature, dance
& architecture—impossible spaces,
secret relationships of spastic machinery,
occluded mirrors, fetish dust, feverish dreams.
The cryptic, the lyrical, & the metaphysical
(not to mention modem impotence, epiphany,
paranoia & despair) all in tiny, mechanical spasms,
as if a mind were two voices, puppeted,
enmeshed in hermetic interiors.
2.
A solitary figure gazes out his window—somnambular
wanderings in the baroque watchmaker's mausoleum,
generatio aequivoca of undead slumber, crumbling
pentimento. We ask our machines to act as much,
if not more—open to vast uncertainties, mistakes,
disorientations—in order to trap fugitive encounters.
Pitted, deformed head perched on a tangle of wire.
Malicious eye's fixed stare. A single hair
protruding out of a soft mole. Wire homunculus:
seduction or disconnected interior monologues.
Jittery macro lens of depthless field out of staggered
camera's fast pan flicker focus melange of ladders,
landscapes, painted backgrounds—
credible arrangements all roofless & abandoned,
tweaked out of crumbling fabric,
privacies in the lives of slumbering materials.
3.
Floppy puppet's burlesque death mask & porcelain
doll head serial numbered like concentration
trapped in sawdust & cloth's sinister dream compound—
zone of secret liberties fermenting in conspiratorial climates.
Out of cold war phantoms & fossilized hierarchies,
we disappear into any country.