Barthes’ Cinema

a student’s painting

Abandon the charted road, veer off the dull grey kerb,
go somewhere, nowhere else, and enter a house of dreams,
sink in an armchair cloud . . . no blunt facts shall disturb
the dreamer of unbeing, where nothing’s as it seems.

Here there are dancers, dazzlers, the delighted and the damned,
all sailors on an old ship that charts the ever-new.
Ah, this one snapshot, let it be framed, be famed,
Barthes’ Cinema, for your eyes. Stranger, it is for you.