Transcript of 'VERSE


Tony Comley's 'VERSE features in the Animate OPEN: Digitalis exhibition. Here is the transcript of the poem that is narrated in the film.

 

In the beginning there was nothing, and in the middle of it... was God.
Vast, omnipotent and calm, he hung in thought simmering and popping with fathomless tiny stars.
If time existed much would pass before the God, young but wise, came to realise that even gods need conversation

So reaching deep into his middle, he pulled an unremarkable rock and hung it in the air.

Violent, belching, sulphured, craggy, obstinate and young was she. An unfit bride, a broken heart boiling by his side.

God, looked upon this molten pitted wench of imperfection... and fell helplessly in love.

With much ado he plucked his heart and gave it as a gift, then puckered forth his might metaphoric godly lips.
Too much to bear, this pyroclastic spurning of his lust pulled from God the world’s first tears and cast them 'cross the universe...

…which fell, as tears so often do, down onto the Earth...
This pelt of woe became a wave, which being shed of Godly grief begat a thousand billion lives… Lives, as it turned out… with names.
ravens, cattle, bison, storks, bulldogs, hamsters, birds of prey, feathered archeopteryx chicks, people, seven kinds of bat, armadillos, deadly fangs, follicles and polar bears, optic endings, prostate glands, finger nails and killer whales, tonsilistis, cats and ants sprung across the Earth like rudimentary hairy hats.
God watched down and saw a face once fabulously scarred, become a teeming mask of fur gazing back through nimbus lids as though a smile were forming on the corners of her eyes.
And then...

He knew not from where it came, but come it did... A shiny tide of things. A sharp, whizzing, dizzy glowing cavalcade of stuff pushed it's fizzy fingers through the moist folds of the Earth and flung the spoils of it's lust high into the air!
Rockets, missiles, helicopters, boomerangs, hot-air balloons, satellites and shuttle cocks, tennis balls and ufos, jumbo jets, a flying car, biplanes, bombs and fireworks became the candles on a cake that no sane god would ever bake.

Silver cuboids leapt like popping candy 'cross a soil tongue. and tickled Earth with painted nails probing folds she never knew existed till electrified.

Time went by and God looked down to watch the jagged face he loved succumb to countless crowns of light and necklaces of glass.

He swore that day a solemn vow, with omni-potent woe, to be as craggy as was once the rock that now lay smooth below.

To this very day she spins, a whirling harlot planetoid, beneath a duvet of the strangest diamonds in the universe.

Meanwhile the one who placed her there, hangs forever in the air, a logo preaching imperfection still stung hard by Earth’s rejection yearning for the days when the world was on fire.