The Pink Ribbon Falls Off the Pedestal, 1984, 98 x 98cms, oil on canvas.

VI. The Pink Ribbon Falls off the Pedestal

At the stroke all falls. From steed to mouse, gilded coach to pumpkin, all falls. The hubristic fall to sense-intensive – all falls.

The tragic boy unravels pinkly into comic mask – he falls. We borrow elastic free-fall from the cat and leopardise desire, stepping down in spots – our ageing feet grow claws. And fall.

Our masks of smiling beguilement do not. The pumpkin is my kin. It rises now. Its segmentarity, deep sexy pleatedness I know, its seediness all mine.

Don’t put me on a pedestal. I am amputated and I am the pedestal. I think through archaic fluidity, dream myself small, electric – oriental cat.

Now I’m tree-draped lazy leopard. I’ve dropped the mask of smiling beguilement.

Icarian I do not sizzle in my long hot fuse from solar experiments.
I step down through improbable articulations, and with a step I plummet from domestic to cosmic.

Despite my plight oh do admire my feline discretion, listen if you can to minimal velvet pad-fall. I am the way down.

As I am the pedestal. It’s not a tragedy. Don’t cry for me. Like the Mona Lisa, like a Madonna sitting on her nest-egg, like Tereisias turned woman, I pleasure in my falling, always already fallen.

I fall pregnant with pleasure-pain, midnight blue and purple, I come in prose. But the ribbon of the great pink girliness is here, oh umbilicus of the feminine that killed so many, comes down in jubilation.

All falls in general Beigesang, the joyous unpricksong to male hubris.

All’s fallen into bliss.