Diane Arbus was a mink-stole princess living a fairy tale
Of silences and cold emptiness with the king and queen of
ice,
She longed to leave the palace for an adventure in
shantytown.
The mannequins in her father’s store sneered at her and over
The counter the sales staff bowed with bitter looks of
resentment.
Father was absent with promotions to plan and women to
pleasure.
Mother was depressed and stayed in bed, planning dinner with
cook,
Smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, patting her face in a
mirror.
Keeping up a false front was the tried-and-tested Nemerov
way
Diane sensed a black ball of shadow haunting the plushiness.
She had no fairy godmother’s wand to magic her through her
glooms.
So she turned her face into life’s slap, provoking the
unreal world
Into clear Rollei squares of wild molten in her sideshow of
freaks.
At a cost. The boy with a toy grenade in his hand was
playing,
But she was primed to implode into the emptiness of her
being.
Unlike her, the Backwards Man in his mac could see his past
behind him.
She knew only what she wished for, a being not swamped by
nothingness.
To be recognised. With hairy shirtless tattooed-torso, the
glowing man
Strikes a fearless prize-fighter’s pose and seems to see her
from his soul.
He doesn’t. She was forging documentary proof of her divided
self.
Transgressive. It was as if an eyeless soul suddenly saw
Electricity. Touched wires. Lit up the darkness in the self.
The Wade twins wear the green dresses their mother made
them.
She shoots them to embody the good and sinister sides of a
single girl.
Trying to lick the roots of her being, she could not reckon
reality.
There was a constant. She wanted to get into someone else’s
skin.
In Revelations she
is naked across a man’s lap looking
Like she is going to shed her aloneness in a bed merger of
flesh.
She shape-shifted to get her way, to share the privacies of
life.
Sex slimed its ooze into her shots as if she actually lived
connection.
She was battling hard to preserve the stain of her
existence.
But in Untitled
the mentally disabled subjects do not see her,
Do not wish to share the secret of her secrets or her
presence.
The truth is she was walking a tightrope stretched above the
void waiting
For someone to scream; their silence was the scream that
unbalanced her.
Her ferret ferocity had hunted freak-show faces to
fantasticate.
Like as if a giddy young nun on her gleeful ministry,
camera-wimpled,
Naughty in her private sin, transgressive, dared you to look
away.
Her ‘freaks’ look as if they had a death riddle for her to
divine.
Her camera shot her death in existence, her own pathology.
No comments:
Post a Comment