Rupert M Loydell and Nathan Thompson

MEMO TO SELF

A is for aborted project, anachronism, and antelope. The oval shapes of light each morning, the rain in the evening. Giant bio-domes of domesticity hanging over us whilst we harvest glitch after glitch after glitch. Sparkle and twitter, glint of sound in the twilight.

I am rowing my boat across the ceiling of the world. The glass igloo I have been living in is still there behind me: the neighbours can see everything, but they dare not throw stones. Ahead of me a bronze swimmer treads water, behind me lies a tin rocket, the wrapper from a chocolate cake, and the screams of the children.

I’m sorry, I didn’t realise we had gone astray. It is difficult to find land or make headway. Memo to self: build a den in the cool dawn place. Memo to reader: hoist the sail and look for linebreaks. This was meant to be a poem!

MEMORIES TO OTHER

If you are a picture on a certain day it comes alive. For instance, the ghost in our bird-house has become invisible while feathers dance around the glass circus (or snow to that effect).

This was never meant but the guide-lines of communication are broken.

Up there in the white open aviary you prepare these songs to the last glitch and twitter but still, there is a right to silence. Why rush to embrace the mourners?

An enormous big top glosses the den you built as a child, frightening the grey horses into leaving. Shadow below. A portrait of blizzards.

So I am surprised to hear of an expedition to find us: the hopes of a swimmer spread among his psychological rations who stares with the intense trajectory of un-thrown stones.

There is a hallmark but the date is illegible.

DUMB THEATRE

The distance between the model and the actual. The accumulation of knowledge is not knowledge. The making of lists, the undoing of actions. Sometimes one overdoes it: this is not without ambiguity.

The tree a piece of scrumpled green paper on a stick. The support beam a prop of balsa wood. The people wooden dolls. The tentative capture of form.

The secret is to never let on. It is a glorious design and we revel in it. If only it was not raining we could sit outside and admire it all day long.

I am afraid when I am alone.

OTHER’S MEMORIES

I have always wanted to be elsewhere, have made flying machines since I was a child. Now I am rooted to the spot, machines clanking, whirring and ringing around me, while people come to call.

Metal petals, wind chimes, self-winding automata. A series of musical waterfalls.

I have a cinema in my kingdom where you can watch me explain, defend, my passion. It, too, keeps me grounded, weighs me down.

I am a sculptor of the imagination: a puppeteer, a ringmaster, a fool.

MOMENTARY LAPSE

It would have been worth asking the rainbow for its favourite colour had it not been mislaid long ago, “stolen by a man in a boat”.

Following interviews with a man claiming two refracting eyes, the conclusion is that the canvas will be lost forever. “If you don’t notice something has gone it will never be returned,” says the rainbow.

In a new barn by the banks of the receding waters another man is tending to his multiplication tables, asking “How many ducks is too many?”

We cannot answer this without first travelling under the waterfall, for which we would need a boat. We had forgotten about the boat. The evidence suggests we will not get it back.