Jeremy Mair

lorjournal

Sophie McPike; you tell me there's an outside world

Two Poems
Jeremy Mair

–

Symmetry/Cemetry

so, we are
                       riding the number one tram
                       up Lygon street

together because
it’s warm in here

half my mind
turns to you
                        enjoys the way
you appear to perceive warmth
                       like I do

the other half
                        turns to Mishka,
                       the talking husky, who
attempts
with limited vocal
and mental assets
to mimic her master’s voice


but of course
                       Mishka has been trained
                       to perform this trick
she doesn’t understand
                       that the clumsy sounds
                       she strains for
                       are supposed to mean

I love you
                       and the whole time
she is probably thinking
                       about an enormous pile
                       of lamb shanks

so, we pass
                       the cemetery
                       and I am thinking
                       about Philip Larkin
                       how he’s ‘surviving’
these days
                       and I ask you what
                       you’re thinking and you’re thinking
                       how if you stacked
                       every bone in that cemetery
end on end
                       you could build a tower
                       that would reach
way up
through
the clouds

                       and I say
                       isn’t that funny
I was just
                       thinking about
a pile of bones
                       but for completely different reasons

 

Guernica

Luggage rubbles the floor
under lightbulb glare. On the
dresser, two tickets
— Melbourne, Berlin —
the sense, always, of
having missed something
important; of having
lingered
on the wrong detail.

Jeremy Mair is a writer and musician living in Melbourne, Australia, and is currently undertaking a Master of International Relations at the University of Melbourne. He has lived at various stages of his life in France and Germany, but both countries sent him back. Jeremy can be found at jeremymair1.tumblr.com

Sophie loves the exploration of lyrical/poetic type story telling in her art. Her work is an ambient aesthetic experience, calming but quizzical, deeply enjoyable, often with an emphasis on symmetry, or repetition and visual rhyming. It’s a careful stitching together of different elements to try to get across the sense of a moment in time or of a thought or feeling.