Piece of My Heart

Anyway you look at it 120 x 100 x 2 cm acrylic on canvas

THE URBAN PROLETARIAT IS IN YOUR FACE (SONNET 5)

Well I’m pretty sure she’d tell anyone to fuck off.

Like you, for example, because you hate her.

Extravagantly tattooed with embedded metals

exported from two possibly three countries 

each one systematically exploited. I’d bet half my

paycheck she’d cross any line. Her hair’s clean,

thick, chestnut brown, like a depraved Kennedy

drooling over apocalyptic video games.

She tries on strap-ons at the local Porn Hub.

Steaming over the event horizon’s a rank delicious

odor of sauerkraut and pork loin plus boiled spud

in Berlin, Chicago Cheese-Steak Sandwich in Cleveland,

a ton of onion everywhere…dude, you may as well

kiss good breath good-bye. Keg party on a back porch

in Portland, and the fat lady on the couch ain’t singin’ till it’s over.

Barefoot white Chick on Cocaine

 

Mary's Cave 70 x 50 cm acrylic on paper

BAREFOOT WHITE CHICK ON COCAINE (SONNET 1)

You thinking about a not quite super model

toasted on cocaine, taking her shoes off

corner of 5^th Ave./ Central Park West

waving them around her like Audrey Hepburn

high on champagne. Tax records show

you back in Wyoming, healthy, jogging,

tax records show you’re the only one

who pays taxes in Wyoming. Only one who reads

New York Review of Books. You thinking about

Classical German Philology on the way to work.

Your thinking on models of thought would seem to fit:

Bordeaux has something in it. Roughly 12%. Is that enough?

I wish Nietzsche had said: if they don’t kill you—people

with significant flaws, minor virtues, licking their lips—

they will make you stronger. 

The All American Dream

 

Color Riot 32,5 x 20,5 cm acrylic on raw linen canvas

“DON’T WORRY. IT’LL BE OVER BEFORE YOU KNOW IT.”

                                                                                                 

                                                                                         For Karin

We used to smoke weed on the roof at work.

Nobody wore hoodies, no hats, not

even when “scoring” in those pre-legal days.

No smart phones, Netflix, no hipsters.

Below us 80 or so bored co-workers willing

the clock to move faster. Young, all we wanted

to do was get high and make out, read important books,

say things we thought were smart. Each of us

was almost something else. I was almost a poet. You were

almost a painter. Our buddy Holt was almost Hemingway.

Mac who wasn’t a close friend but almost funny

said things like, “I’m as queer as a football

bat,” then let out a rebel yell. He was from Mississippi,

which explained his gift for metaphor. I was almost jealous.

There was another guy who when on the phone

always said, “my name’s Cap. Like baseball cap.”

And that was about it from Cap, except once on the roof

when I was holding forth on the Pointlessness of Life and an

earthquake hit. Cap was off in a corner eating his daily bagel.

The building shrugged its shoulders. Slowly. Cap appeared calm,

even a little bored, as if he’d been listening to

my peroration on existential dread. “Don’t worry,”

he commented in a deep, hollow, accidently cynical

voice, “it’ll be over before you know it.”