CD Boyland

Triptych (after Francis Bacon)

I. [left]

Three floors
of carceral rendition clerks snow-blind
with data-drift - labouring over

studies which show changes in cognition due to
desire

for administrative hurdles, poorly designed scoping
documents – larval, flesh-sculpted

figures hallucinating raw data, algorithms, representative
fractal patterns

at frequencies
invisible to

the human eye - building their nests out of chewed-up
and spat-out handwritten memos

based on their policy of mundane intervention, the dreary
exculpation

of all of mankind’s sins, circuit glitches, bugs in the
source code

a mandate for bureaucracy which stands or falls on its
ability to deliver one last, public
act of

crucifixion

II. [centre]

Deny your gods three times, champagne and oysters

crawl back to your studies and offer penance

what you were good for did you do?

once were there carved figures on the altarpiece

a laughing beggar at the marketplace of images

skyward gesture to your basest urges, innerspace/boy

holding no hope of a reprieve from all these cocks
and asses

happiest hung in crucifixion pose, nailed to the mind’s-eye of
a generation

III. [right]

She weaves a shawl, sat before her loom on a three
legged stool

into the cloth, a notation of stitches, all of her studies,
all of her quiet foretellings

preserving the record, the names of the dead, for
posterity, for those who would see

into the warp and the weft, she sums the figures,
tallies the lost

works through the night, pauses for a meal at the
break of dawn

the grease on her plate, flesh degenerated to base
remainder, this mortal rendering

from outside her window, the roseate stain of a
new day creeps up the glass

the pale shadow of another unremarked crucifixion
waits beneath her hands.

CD Boyland (@chrisdboyland) is a [d]eaf poet who lives in Cumbernauld, near Glasgow, Scotland. His first pamphlet, 'User Stories' was published in 2020 by Stewed Rhubarb Press.