AD Harper

The Gallery

Dead dukes and queens eight-feet high stare down,
the varnish cracked, the memory of school-trip
sick depression while other better schools
take notes towards essays on tempera and we're
more interested in the professional disinterest
of the guards supposedly immune to goading,
or is that the soldiers at the palace, red
leather sofas, tourists ticking off a sight, scenes
from the Bible I can't name, dragons without
wonder, muscles fake as marble, these rooms

I am where I am when I am dreaming

so I walk through to the nineteenth century
instead of the stern dogoodery, the lesson plans,
why can't I dream this? I ask the audio guide,
but it murmurs on about the scandal of non-realism,
the crowds outraged, the tiny sums the pictures
sold for, how there is another better world
to wake into outside, the mimes, the bagpipes,
the smell of death by burger van, non-native lions
yawning on their plinths. I check my phone for messages
and walk into the drizzle. This, I tell myself, this.

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AD Harper's work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Rattle and The Manchester Review, among others. He tweets as @harpertext.