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The Shape That Has Held Me

from Unspoken Word by Steven Ball

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about

Australian visual poet and super 8 filmmaker pete spence sent me a copy of a poem, which surprised me for being a sort of gently surreal existential piece. Surprising because pete’s work was usually characterised for me at that time by elegant cut-up image-text visual poetry. But this is no straight forward nihilism of being that spence has penned, there is great humour in word play in lines such as "I am a notion I search always to find, like a small lantern of fur sleeping at the foot of my bed, which I carefully avoid waking when I enter the immense collapse of my room". In retrospect my reading of it is rather earnest. Like Say Zero it is mostly rhythmic fractured fragments of the sound of my voice, which has a certain squelchy vivacity, occasionally it breaks into legibility. Recorded 2000.

lyrics

the shape that has held me since my birth has not had hold upon my thought.
slowly all my senses fell by the wayside of my thought's parade of places
unfamiliar, the pages filled magnetically with the ejaculations of severed
particles. i am gathered only in my movements which identify me with this
place of eroticism and otherness. darkness is administered slowly and
everything is left clear and distant, touch becomes something that has to be
reshown. i have felt nothing since i was sixteen, but i continue to see the
edges of what can be felt and tasted. i am recurrently blind, but somehow i
gratefully fill this page which is every page. the blueness of my eyes
reflect the immensness of a clear sky, they are everywhere and without
being. i am a notion i search always to find like a small lantern of fur
sleeping at the foot of my bed which i carefully avoid waking when i enter
the immense collapse of my room. i have chosen the parenthesis i live in,
they are the atmosphere split asunder. i breathe the iconic darkness of the
sun, its blooms bustling over the plush remainders and tokens of history,
the almost yesterday of utterance. i speak without memory. i remember only
arrival and only recognize the place it is next to. i am lost amongst the
continuance of the habit of my constraints. my life is a song tied to the
mast of a storm. i am looking for a shore where the footstep of someone who
is approaching is carved like amber light in the sand. i find myself each
morning as a carved effigy of memory, before that i remain a plant growing
in the fertile dust of oblivion. my dreams forget me. immensity is smaller
than a dice. the sun is the eye of a sparrow and flight melts before thought
and becomes a triangle. when i awake i am embodied by a hasty structure that
attempts to speak, but only cavorts with a few rehearsed jestures. i am near
to nothing. and nothing is capacity. to resemble everything is knowledge,
but i am filled with only a capable emptiness which is an outline of tense
filiaments. air is the only recurrent form. i breathe slowly the immensity
of light which drowns form. i am not awake. there is no chart that is not
once and for all a fiction. the ropes that hold me are either tidy or
untidy. famine is everywhere and i eat convulsively the wind.

pete spence

credits

from Unspoken Word, released August 13, 2009
words by pete spence

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Steven Ball London, UK

Steven Ball has been working as an artist since the early 1980s, in film, video, sound, installation, and performance, and has been a member of the post-punk DIY group Storm Bugs. In 2014 he started writing and recording songs as a solo project, being particularly concerned with experimenting with which kinds of texts might constitute a song lyric. ... more

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