Kim Kardashian's Ass

 

Ebbe (Diptychon) - Low Tide (Diptych) 90 x 30 cm acrylic/spray paint/ink on canvas

KIM KARDASHIAN’S ASS

A thief put a knife

to my throat and said

give me everything you got.

I emptied my pockets and out fell a volume of Shakespeare.

Then some essays by Schopenhauer.

He stabbed me, I think, not so much

for my taste in reading matter

as for the all too voluminous proof

that I read at all. Read too much.

Read as if in defiance of the world, its lousy zero-sum options.

The wound wasn’t as deep as the Grand Canyon

nor as broad as Kim Kardashian’s ass

but look for me tomorrow and you will find

this promiscuous reader and epicurean

anarchist, and all that that entails,

in a world of pain.

To say how much we know

is to admit nothing

but we do know someone’s coming for us  

in the Swedish dark coming fast

and nobody seems to know when

and we never know why, just as we never know

why good fish tastes like chicken, but there you are

or why I am standing on a sidewalk

in what appears to be Dallas, Texas

at four in the morning a knife sticking out of me. But here I am.

La Mer

Maritim - Maritime 80 x 80 cm acryl/oilpastel/spraypaint on canvas by Karin Goeppert

SOMETIMES LESSER, SOMETIMES BETTER

There you are being pushed

   along the coastal path

by an eighty-mile an hour wind,

mouth hurting from smiling so hard.

Your spirit, escaping, races around

   like a balloon cut loose

at a child’s birthday party

but remains in your body because

frankly it has nowhere else to go.

On the umbrella pines, which are

leaning away like boxers on the ropes

who want to fight back but cannot,

   is light

the color of good English marmalade.  

The wind is

spitting wads of foam all over

   a disappearing beach. Meanwhile

Just three miles away in an atavistically

   smoky room,

a woman whose smile, without light,

has declared her absence, returns briefly

to show amusement  

   as your sometimes lesser, sometimes better self

shifts groaningly its fat ass from one side

   of a barstool to the other.

Divine Intervention

Morning Walk, Uffing 50 x 70 cm acryl on canvas by Karin Goeppert

DIVINE INTERVENTION

If children laugh at you, and dogs bark at your hair,

don’t worry about it: they love you. Who wouldn’t?

And the world is not a shopping mall. It is a garden,

a garden within gardens. Prowling beneath the fronds

are beautiful animals, and we love them hard. And

there are moments. There are still some moments.

Someone I know, a poet of sorts, once told me

he went for a run on the island of Samos.  Up through the olive trees.

Fresh Aegean morning, just before the heat drops

its full weight on your head; the quiet unruffled sea giving off

a beaten golden sheen. Not even vaguely devout, he nevertheless

raises his hands and praises Zeus. Offers thanks for the literally

awesome light and its revelation of gnarled limbs, the writhing trunks

and a Swedish or Danish girl in shorts and t-shirt picking her way

down the path smiling at me as if after a night of love. And for

the goofy little gesture of lifting my palms to the sky I thank you as well.

Would be greedy to ask for more.  Not that that’s ever stopped me.