Fossil

A poem about endings — and beginnings.

Once, I smelled a room.

Half filled with crude oil that mirrored, in its stillness

the ornate ceiling — becomes the glossy ground

where a metal walkway invites me to access its center.

Pungent sour — the slick odor of something rotten, yet familiar,

tipping me towards the viscous verge that stains the cornices, the paneling — and the accepted norms.

Crashing through the smooth illusion, flailing in the goop of ancient trees and insects, I fall in and flounder — sucked by millions of years of sediment that have been pumped into a government building to make a point.

The sliding tide rising…

All orifices, now crude — turn black and bogged from the inside out.

I am peat.

Once, I smelled a room and became petrified.

After the show, the artist finds me, lumpen.

I am burned ceremoniously as a warning to overreliance on the oil industry.

I don’t know how they cleaned the room.

The inspiration for this piece came from an artwork in the YBA Retrospective in County Hall, London in 2003.

I don’t know the name of the artist, but everyone who walked into the oil-filled room that I know of, came out changed.

That’s the real art.

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