Radio Vortex Poem by Andrew Duncan

Glass cubes and aluminium cylinders
set out a city of primary forms
composite, allowing movement in three planes

Greek violence in Egyptian space
isometric hoplite, flattening field
in frieze perspective, to arrest recession

crab, mailed, on intermittent spiral
helical, shimmering bolts fire sapphire dust
spinning smoke grains mark thin pistons

clock scan of rotary beams
solar swathes from perforated drum
adorned with beasts and jingling wheels

soaked by impingent radiant colour, vortex
is spiral channel for skitter of silver crab
the mark of the new moon on fused dorsal plane

crab demersing from receding wave
tawny, speckled, flat; colour keyed to sand
colour vision through refringent wash

crab vapour from the surface of a star
flashed outwards with pulsed ichnographic spiral
— spectre caught on empty paper leaf

held up on this aluminium tower
on a jet of choliambics
erect, in civic oratory's

slipstream, opaque screen
like chalk ground spread on canvas
for recoilless bolts of bodiless colour
hard red, hard green, silver and black,
thundering and screeching at each other.