Self-Portrait with Aquarium Octopus

Flashing a Mirror

Where water, glass and light cut through each other, where one side of the glass is underwater and the other is not, one cosmos seems first to bisect, then kiss, another. Up against the steamy divide the octopus explodes and collapses, explodes and collapses in its soft hysteria of saying: it is compelled by will or ennui to be wholly on display, compelled, like any extraterrestrial, to show itself –

This is what I’ve got, it says with every lunge, I’ll show you all I’ve got which you don’t have, this head, for example, clumsily bashing glass like a blunt-nosed angel’s, a throb of plasma. Though many limbs flower crazily from this eye-lens, it says, I don’t know what it is I’ve got but here’s the centre, the centre where it is. And you a man, a woman, it says, and you neither or nothing at all – a smudge in need of an apogee.

You don’t know what I am or what it is you are, you do not know, whatever you are, whatever you are, whatever you are.

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Arcimboldo’s Bulldog