Sophie Mayer

Written for the Boardwalk: Eric Gregory Awards event on Friday 12th November 2010. I won a Gregory in 2004 (which enabled me to go to Iceland, where I peed wild on the moss, as per the poem), hence the year commemorated.

Pissing into the Wind: 2004

‘This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. … A storm is blowing from Paradise: it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them… This storm is what we call progress.’ Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’

pissing into the wind

pissing into relief, into the release of the detrusor muscle and the midbrain’s periaqueductal gray

pissing into lichen, which is fjallagrasa, which is sphaerophorus fragilis, into lava and lady’s bedstraw

pissing into bare ass, into the hiss of the moss, into mosquito larvae

pissing into basalt, black obsidian, rolling thufur

pissing into geysirs, into Gulfoss, into oxidised calderas

pissing into the central highlands, a 1 in 2 incline, into geothermal steam, into hydroelectric

pissing into tented protests against smelters

pissing into the milkbottle taste of stale aluminium

pissing into extinction the Po’uli

pissing into fault lines, into the continental divide, into volcanic chains

pissing into Midsummer’s Eve under the midnight sun

pissing into the houses of the elves

pissing into fantasy the plumed horsemen wheeling towards lava-landscapes of war

pissing into the coffin of George Patton from the firefields of Fallujah

pissing into the dossier, the donut box, the ballot box, the history books

pissing into panties reading my cherry for Kerry, reading axis of Eve

pissing into evanescence the transit of Venus and the victory of Greece

pissing into that dress / I’m going out dancing / Starting off red / Clean and sparkling

pissing into the post box, into the ether, into the phone line, into the check-in line

pissing into my skin in winged ink and chrystos and that lost, last transparency

pissing into the dark against danced silence, floorboards sprung to insistence

pissing into your ear, pissing into your mouth, pissing into my lips, into my bed

pissing into the earthquake

pissing out the tsunami