Rikki don't lose that Number

 

Lyrisches Zwischenspiel - Lyric Interlude 48,5 x 33 cm Pastell - available -

THAT CARNIVAL THING

The works of man, woman,

beast of field and barn yard

on display at our local Food Fair

in plastic wrapped tableau vivant

look good enough to eat. Still,

I see no Renaissance up ahead

no Enlightenment with its bitchy

wit and powdered wigs and do we really  

need to revisit the Age of Woodstock

with its hygiene issues and bad hair

yet the road beckons and some of its

attendant trees are rather pretty   

shadows standing out in subtle relation   

to their forbearers and in which the new masses,

painted with colorful tatts, lovingly pierced, have fun

smiles stretching like a dancer on the subway. They party

at Carnival, while the rest of us stay at home, immersed

in the fourth episode of season three. Which is preferable

to an encounter with some dread-locked desperado

who, on the night bus, reads back to us

our own address before saying, “Later, dude.” That’s   

when all you want from life is a cool, gray,

mediocre morning in Berlin. Here’s what’s required—

take a number. Submit the paperwork.

Patiently await the results of clerical negligence.

Waiting is easier now; waiting is rest.

 

Les Fleurs du Mal

Les Fleurs du Mal 80 x 80 cm acryl/gesso on linen canvas - available -

THE PERILS OF PLEASURE

My adventures in pleasure began

with twenty-four jars of baby food a day.

Grew so large I couldn’t move anymore,

dwarf whale stranded in its playpen. Since then there’s  

vintage Medoc, Lamb chops sprinkled with rosemary

and olive oil, lingerie photo spreads, the prose of Ben Lerner,

“the isles of Greece, the isles of Greece, “ und so weiter.

I’ve enjoyed life too much to deserve a career. Pleasure 

is even available to the guy who sleeps beneath 

the same tree in the park each night, smoking a self-rolled,    

inhaling so deeply there’s nothing left to exhale. Enjoyment as   

animal right, maybe, but even Epicurus thought we have

a problem with pleasure, the more we get

the more we want, and it’s never enough. Take Don Draper in “Mad Men”

fucking every woman who’s half-way willing, most

of whom quite a bit more than half-way,

yet whose unhappiness is a multiplex of many screens.

Raised in a whore house which, seen loosely, is

his version of twenty-four jars of baby food a day.

Bring ‘em on—willing women, lamb chops, etc.— as “W”

disastrously put it. On “The West Wing” someone says, a little too

sonorously, “I serve at the pleasure of the President.” Which

sounds about as enticing as a long weekend in Detroit, in winter, alone.

In Transition

 

Mauerblümchen - Wallflower 80 x 100 cm acryl/dispersionsfarbe/ink on canvas

IN TRANSITION

The cable installation dude looks as if he’s been doing push-ups

all of his life. He’s eying your wife steadily,

unabashedly. Given the context, scenario, the looming

event horizon you consider a response. Why not

strangle the fuckwit with one of Cynthia’s

push-up bras? For once a touch of punning poetic justice.

But aggression’s leaking away replaced by a softer,

gentler, more fluidly feminine substance. Headaches keep 

circling back, settling in like sodbusters in the north-east

sector of empty territory once known as your brain. Life loving

sociopaths, charlatans in sharkskin suits, used to lurk there,

replaced now by a midwife, two hairdressers,

a depressed clerk weeping in a broom closet. What’s this all about?

Your analyst has suggested you take up ballet, as if lifting

a fifteen year old girl over your head and sprinting rather

daintily through a bevy of dying swans just might clarify

certain “issues” in your life. Soloists lined up at the barre.

Staring into the mirror, nubile Denise asks you to sit on her 

upright feet, your manly weight needed to bend, reshape, deform.

“I’ll get back to you later,” you say, then lock yourself in a bathroom

stall in which you dig through your “dance” bag, like mom searching

frantically for her lipstick, a clean tissue, so long ago—you’ve taken to crying

in elevators. Must be the music, the sad songs. Those testosterone blues.