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James Byrne

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Hungover at The Tate

Always offshore. On days like these
I waver towards a dishevelled brink
that films itself over and over again.

My eyes limp from canvas to canvas
through every tatter-brained inter-fuse
within Turner’s melodramatic apertures.

Dizzied, I stop awhile, read the small print.
The private asylum that became a dome
around his mother’s life: his own life.

                   ***

So many eyeblinks have made their way
in-between the ten million snapshots
my eyes have supposedly harvested.

All this admin in the rigor of the mind.
All these invisible juries to consult
before a man creates his own partitions.

So much internal weather, I can’t recall
when the world in earshot seemed sober,
low-sea: a safe-ship with episodic creaks.

James Byrne's first collection, Passages of Time (Waterways), was published in 2003. He founded New Blood, a popular monthly event at Covent Garden's Poetry Café, and he is co-editor of The Wolf poetry magazine.

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