Antegression
GARETH COWLEY
“The three-act structure is intrinsic to the human brain’s model of the world….It is therefore an inevitable property of almost any successful drama, whether the writer is aware of it or not.” - Edoardo Nolfo
“The body remembers what the mind forgets” - Jacob Moreno
Echo/Obscura
I delve into the memory once more, His parents close the storybook,
Pale and softened from a thousand readings. Stopped where the Gorgon’s stare is frozen
Men and monsters driving children to doom in the polished reflection of Perseus’ shield.
And terrible magic spoken with stolen names. A name is just something else to be shouted.
MAGICIAN reveals a standalone mirror with what appears to be a young boy reflected to the audience.
Hot concrete spurns small feet Back against the cold wall of the bathroom
A summer dash, sweating and breathless. His clothes are soaked into the stainless steel.
My heartbeat heavy in my ears, The silence outside gives him all the time
It feels like this moment is trapped in amber. To bury this tale at the bottom of a well.
MAGICIAN shatters the mirror and a dark shadow like mist pours from it onto the stage floor.
My bare soles imprint the carpet, grooved Shape is pressed into mattress
Lines in the record play out a sepia echo Rorschach swirls in bed-wet blankets,
That mingles with the sweet smell of dessert. Sinking into senselessness.
What the body feels, the mind forgets. The dark night draws ever outwards
MAGICIAN reaches hand into shadowy mist and pulls out a dove that flies away.
2. ode to a bloodied piece of glass
waking up soaked in shimmering sweat and piss from a cartesian nightmare with bedsheets twisted around flesh in a polyester gyre as haunted memories summoned by prophetic troubadours shiver in fear and freeze as the long dark hallway threatens to carry every carefully worded whimper to the terminal point recurring in a wine dark mind heady in the thrashing hallucinations of a civil war of one in which ceasefires are called out to ringing ears too busy listening for the muttered recollections of a child-cry echoing in a fractured valley where rockfalls crash down to cast tea leaf readings of a future formed in rhyme and myth spoken in voices long dead arguing with each other over which tense of the verb is best suited to describe someone who wants to live so badly they’d rather die than be the person they are right now
3. Samson Carrasco
My self shattered with a Quixotic lance
thrust,
Narcissus’ pool with blood and quicksilver bursting
Water broken to love yourself, unjust
Ripples slaking no thirst for internal conversing.
The undead reflection warps pallor into prophesy,
as doom is sung on the twisted lips of ghouls.
A parlour trick now obscured by funerary
shrouds
hung over Alice’s doorway in accordance with the rules.
The sitting, torn in two by shouting stones
cast,
is ended as weeping is transfigured into mundanity.
In waking, dreamless visions reclaim the past
As Haemolacric fountains fill the baptistry.
Ouroboros dances to Fibonacci as I return to myself
In Orpheus’ spring tracing a new marvel on the surface.
Gareth Cowley
A poet, teacher, librarian and multi-disciplinary artist, Gareth is based on Wallumedagal land. He’s exhibited, curated and performed across Sydney and NSW. Through the decolonisation and reconstruction of texts, he loves exploring how language continues to make new meanings.
