The sea wall, broached. The heaving ocean swells over it. Water flying in howling wind collapses the brick and mortar and concrete stays like pins. There is no barrior.

What is to keep her from sweeping out to sea, her black dress like a murder of crows flying about her?

Her eyes are lit with terror as the water rises, foaming.

She shrieks at the turbulent sky; her voice joins the screaming winds.

She is thin and flaps like a scarecrow.

She stands on an outcrop. The water swirls around her feet, but doesn’t wash her away. The rock holds her safe.

Her face a venom of fury
when she sees me.

What is it she desires?

The sky is molten, mon amour. A broil of clouds in my heart. How long can I wait?

In this silence in which I wait.

You cannot know, mon homme chéri.

For I do not wish to burden you.

A relational line, a trajectory, a specific set of connections, patterns, motions into. Fire of desire. The threads extinguish themselves in the smoldering flame. What is moving towards erases itself as it burns, charred, blown away in the wind.

Will you catch me?

Or will you let me pass by?

If language mediates between the world and our visceral bodily sensations, is a discourse teaching us how to organize ourselves collectively, cohere us socially, shapes how we think and feel in our approach to reality, then money mediates similarly.

Money is the mediating transmission of the world we have created for our inhabitation.

Money flows as invisibly as language through the atmosphere, roaming the globe, making our world, enabling us to live, eat, work, support ourselves, our families, each other.

Money transferred to luxury cushions us against the harsh elements.

Money is our mediatrix.

The earth turns on its axis but the world turns on money, capital that sloshes through the global markets with the force of the daily oceanic tides.

At the core, in the stock market, picking who you will support is as risky as any artistic venture, any poem-on-the-edge. Decide on what you will support – research, intuit, trust, leap. How is the support of each other’s business’s through purchase of stocks any different to the galleries that sell our work? Aren’t traders traders?

Investment is risky; art is risky. Of course there is the rote way, the safe way through the tried and true, but that’s not where the excitement is, nor the gains. Do we invest in our talent?

The weave of words that flows over the world: in the absence of the objects to which they refer; in the absence of the author who set them in their sequences on their journeys.

Phrases, sentences, paragraphs, flowing, flowing, on and on. Picked up and read, retained momentarily. Onward, joining, dispersing, shoals of words, tides of words, flowing through our consciousnesses, into our ears, our eyes, and out of our lips, from our fingertips.

The weave of words that weaves our world, shaping it into familiar patterns, without which it would all fall apart and yet which like a membrane separates us from reality. Mimicry. Artistry. Telling us how to see, how to be. The language that shapes us, shaping. Weave of words sculpting.

Is inseparable from time which structures us, organizes us into communal cohesion.

Who cares if we are carriers of the word, transmitters of culture?

The intimacy of love sighing, your lips

kissing you, I
melt in your mouth

the inner meaning of us, our relation,
cannot be grasped or apprehended in this language
or any other language
even the language of the heart

even as it structures our desire

Monsieur, you exist in your absence.
Not only that,
but you exist in my absence.

The nexus of you
renders love possible.

Which carries on without either of us.

Words float under my rib cage, cascade over my heart, and waterfall down my body. It was invisible, but you knew. I could see you reading me.

Like a streak of fish, a discourse of signifiers referring to each other, signifiers whose identities are only their relations to other signifiers, an entire system mediating reality.

The colour; the ocean.

Floating like thought.

But, then.

The discourse into which we are born is a discourse of love, at the depths. Never mind the story.

Love creates itself.

What else do we need?

In the vision behind my vision I see a helmet of hair of tightly coiled serpents. They are alive but they are the colour of alabaster. Why are they tightly coiled around her statuesque head? Do they grow from her scalp or do they merely cling to her head? What do they eat? Realism is not the point of myth, I remind myself.

As I move somnolently through the world of banking and investment, I hear hissing. It is like my muse is calling. In this number-drenched world of income, or how we survive communally.

Do an aesthetic of art and an aesthetic of finance arise from the same roots?

What does the Gorgon want? Why is she imaging here?

Writhing, coiling in these numbered halls
papered with endless account statements...

When he stood, in the peace of post-coital stillness, and said, 'I want to destroy you,' she waged a battle for her life for the next 15 years.

No-one emerged unscathed.

She rose, a soot-blackened woman, from the fine layers of silted taupe ashes, with scorched feet, able to see in all directions.