Watch Out

 

Vorbereitung auf den Angriff- Preparing for Attack 50 x 70 cm acryl/ink on canvas

SPRING CHICKEN

                                              What is more precise than precision? Illusion.

                                                                                       Marianne Moore

The way hesitation gets

worked into the ageing process,

as if all the wheels and levers of decision

were rusted up. Yes, it does suck, said

the little man with big cigar and handful  

of firecrackers—it being the Fourth and all—a little more  

certainty might help. Just a touch. When you were young      

life was all hurry up and wait for that Big Break  

to come sauntering up the front steps, say something    

interesting, assorted head hunters dropping by     

with languid sexually enhanced females  

filling your hot tub and talking, like, real slow. Then you wake up

in a thin-skinned bungalow, at the back of

an old friend’s property, amid the weeds, and you’re 35, then 45, then

and your flip-flops are worn down uneven, and you limp for some reason.   

To fiddle for a while with Rimbaud’s definition of self: “I”  

is every role you have ever played plus that certain something

unique: its due date, if you will, its shelf life. Okay, fair enough. Then what?

“Watch out,” slurs the lead singer just before

the guitar break: the gods are jealous of their privileges:

at the end of the nightshift don’t expect any overtime.

Medley

 

Medley 30 x 24 cm acryl on canvas by Karin Goeppert

THE SWEET AND THE SOUR

Keep going, she said, never stop.

The first place was a window seat

near a picture of Mary and her Little Lamb,

the window right above an approximately vertical   

driveway and she, unofficial goddess of mirth,

threatening to dangle us from the window ledge. Proving?

Even mothers can have a fairly fucked-up sense of humor.

The second place had lemons and limes

pieces of which floated in the potent beverages

   of village elders.

The third place was a desert landscape.

A cactus garden in the side yard. It scared me. It

was too sharp. There was grapefruit with sugar sprinkled on top

paving a soft pink highway to the sweet and sour, the wisdom

of precisely mixed opposites, and that you could eat them with breakfast.

Then:

                                                                              a seminal scene

from Fellini Satyricon: a naked African girl

in bed with two smitten bi-sexual boys,

chattering in a pretty language no man can understand

but wants to listen to for the rest of his life, her breasts

like two small perfect fruits you might find

ripening in some amply watered oasis in Ethiopia or Somalia,

her hands like elegant birds hovering in space—

though where the sour amid all of this sweetness might be

found is not entirely clear, and should remain so,

and why this scene should be deemed “seminal” is

not all that clear either, but we will leave it at that—

and a crucial moment in “Sentimental Education” when Flaubert

has Frederic Moreau feel compassion for the gray haired woman

he glimpses briefly behind shutters,

the older woman he was obsessed with in his youth

when the sweet and the sour

wouldn’t have been seen on the same plate together

speaks for itself, and that is enough.

 

Coming Home

 

Reclining Figure 80 x 60 cm c/o Karin Goeppert

BEAUTY

You deep read some pretty girl’s mangled syntax

as if it were a dissertation on the Metaphysical Poets.

Alone, the spectacle of her thighs invites sonnets and arias.

Curled up on her lap are your dirtiest thoughts,

brimming with ambition. But instead of making your day

she makes you put snow tires on her car, a cute

little import, and says “Thanks, “dad,” ” as she hands you ten bucks.

The mushrooms are ravishing: freckled, tinged ochre, shapely.

Some of them look like very attractive underwater creatures.

But only the reckless would eat them. The ignorant

or self-destructive. Just look at them. And what of those

other “shrooms”, the dried-out kind locked up in a baggy, which

if they could sing would sound just like the lovely Grace Slick?

I’m looking at a post-modern

cave painting, some interestingly orchestrated

slabs of color, or I’m looking at a sheepish Ulysses

drag a half-empty wine skin into his wife’s bed; she stops

curling her eight pound novel, smiles, flexes, reluctantly reassures,

“Of course I missed you, you big pussy.” Now, that’s pretty. 

White Trash Wedding

Quantum 39 x 49 cm c/o Karin Goeppert