Thank You for Your Honesty by Sophie Collins

A response to digital prints, animations and texts by Niamh Riordan

1)

To disturb reality using
its own means
and not a subjective interpretation thereof
presenting the viewer with an image
more abject – in the truer sense of the word –
than another kind
which displays contrivances to discomfit her
It is a pure expression of hope

a challenge to the natural order
the moral framework of material honesty
which prizes marble over stucco
a hierarchy with no equivalent
in poetry (though undoubtedly we will it), where
a stated allegiance
to ‘truth’ and ‘“the functioning(s)” of “language”’
coupled with any broad effect of semantic cohesion
is usually enough (if
issued from the correct source)

Analogical infirmity
consciously acknowledged
confounds the ‘flow’
Still I am forced to ask the disingenuous question,
Is marble alive?

Without a metabolism, cells
or the ability to achieve homeostasis, no

2)

To perform bemusement again and again
as a waiving of authority
(and so too of blame)

Honesty in a community of what is thought of as
blameless self-interest
makes you cry a lot, even (especially?) in instances
where it manifests in harm done to you and to others
via indirect means
for that too (the action) is honesty

(and perhaps a more fundamental kind)

3)

Flashes
in the centre of my field of vision
are gentle
cannot be said to increase or decrease in frequency
over time
Doctors don’t worry much about such disturbances

Asked the same question of an adult in childhood
surmised from the response
a theory of germs within the retina
as magnified by the eye’s lens