Brian Purcell’s ‘2001’

From Filmworks

1968
I

A small boy beneath a big screen
that begins to split, somersault, explode
at the beginning of an infinite journey.

I look up.
Where was this emptiness
and where was my god

whose worship I had abandoned
for these colours splitting my eyes
and raw space invading my head?

These disembodied voices
like claws of sound
scratch at the fabric of my world

while a horde of priests and priestesses
who fail to sing in key
are praising an entity I don’t know.

One human face
at the centre of the screen
is caught in a mesh of light.

The birth of stars
in plasmas of gold and white
configure our distress

drifting in the cold night
growing, imploding foetuses
broken eggs spreading

across liquid space
and shells beneath magnets
approximate prophets undone

bearing the caskets of angels
while slowly winnowing
the wheat of the stars.

Eclectic flavours escorted by
hexagons in close formation.
Passionate details of cementing cells

untying
salacious pink seas and green skies
watching

the eclipse becoming an oculus
into a room in an upturned palace
where the mirrors silently observe us.

Cocaine Versailles
a place where anyone can live
in a future we can’t know

and shouldn’t try to know
knowing what we know –
that no-one makes it

for when the glass breaks and we see
the vision of our death
why would we consent to be reborn?

II

All of this and more
I saw.
It was Sunday.

I should have been in Mass
to witness again the transmutation
of wine and bread into the body of Christ

but I’d seen something else
beyond understanding:
the birth of doubt

or the origin of poetry.

What was happening?
My mind was firing
expanding.

It was all meaningless
yet meant everything.

As the planets aligned
ahead of me
I looked down

at infinite space
and above.
What kept me

nailed to this place
now that everything was moving?
The glass was broken.

III

55 years ago
when I returned home
my father got a strap

and punished me
for missing Mass.
It was the last time.

Perhaps he sensed
I was lost in a space
he couldn’t and didn’t want to see.

Yet strangely as he hit me
I didn’t feel
any earthly pain.

My mind was still exploring
other dimensions
beyond the reach

of his Catechism.