HEAVY WATER / RIDDLED TIDE
Written by Fan Wu and performed by Stephen Jackman-Torkoff, commissioned by Art Spin in Sept. 2026.
HEAVY WATER
On dreams I'm moving through heavy water
The love is enormous, it's lifting me up
I'd rather be sleeping
I'd rather fall into tidal waves
Right where the deepest currents fall
- Grouper, Heavy Water/I’d Rather Be Sleeping
Down in the Portlands I met up with a man, a perplexed hero out of step with his own story.
He taught me that a drydock is a ship that can be flooded to allow a damaged watercraft to enter, then drained & lifted so the hull remains completely out of the water.
There’s a hollow inside of you where you take in things smaller and weaker than you.
There’s a towering iron gate rusted over that keeps the water from filling up all the way.
And the controlled flood rises to allow the ship to enter, and when it floods out the ship lies on pillars with mangled wood on top.
In the hull of the ship, hundreds of graffiti markings adorn the inner walls.
Workers would empty out the last bursts of their paint cartridges to sign their name, to make an abstract slash, or leave a scrap of wisdom.
He smells of sawdust, hard oil, and tiny pine mints you can only buy in Jean Coteaus.
I feel my distinctions from the world mass around me like gnats.
I fall in love with cowboys and shepherds so I never have to stay in one place.
And thus always do I have someone else’s shadow to chase.
He comes from the bushes, from the ocean floor, a siren with no song, only the fathomless churn of denial and fright.
And personality is another word for the cloak we choose against the ravages of loss.
He turns down a backroad — he puts a hand behind his back — he keeps his hand to my chest as he pivots his gaze to another and then another still — he stays by me, waiting for the flood, to unlatch the flood doors, and I can find out if he’ll hang on the line or whisk away into the slipstream.
And the Self is a salt crystal at best, a protrusion awaiting its erosion back to its first form.
And if I seem forlorn it is not from a personal sadness but the way the world takes me on, stitching together saviour complex and wounded healer, blocking the dawn.
The love is enormous, like it’s enough to lift me up, like it’s enough to bring me crashing down, two thousand tonnes of detritus and structure.
RIDDLED TIDE
And the sky descends in whorls, spangled with intimate weather, the transfiguring weave of it all bellows beneath the surface of reality, the perseids pat me on the back, and frangible as a bleached shell I shatter into a motley assortment of species, I make foley with my limbs as kazoos and my lips as wind, mimicking the universe blow for blow, let me enfold you, lifting hips to the lightning storm, my back up against the beginning of time, steam rises from metal as wire rises from sun, and my little boat crosses the great highway, and death too teems with life in the savour of grey, snail in silent tilt, the snake curls unto itself, the cormorant redeemed, my soil leached blue, my private piece of nimbus, my capacity to linger on, my wildflower at the edge of the mind —
O let me drain you, unfold you, and undo the wall of pain around which your life has crept through, and free you from the grip of the suckling cowrie and the unrelenting lamprey, and unbuckle the armour you’ve wrought for yourself from fear and retreat, and lay my hand on your shoulder as you go forth, coming from the west down to the east, down from the zenith of isolation, down where love is abhorred if only given in word, my soil renewed, my public sky, my startling frontier of fire, my wildflower at the edge of the breath —
The illusion of the self is wildly undone, and I meet in dissolve with ochre wave, ashy knees, panic grass, soapstone, broken china, fire ant colony, mucosal prophylactic, local fern, banal water bottle, rotting papaya, marina snack shack, eye jelly, the iPad princess, a shelter of ligatures, a crustacean dusk, mirror flashing out, mirror peering in, living octave, bird that breathes for me, ladder to paradise, this buxom surrender, this dogged responsibility, this laidback process of dying, this principle of non-interference, this apple named “cosmic crisp,” my soil upturned, my final comet loop, my spine stretched against the horizon, my wildflower at the edge of the void —
I'm as puzzled as the new born child
I'm as riddled as the tide
Should I stand amid the breakers?
Or should I lie with death, my bride?
- This Mortal Coil, Song to the Siren