Wayward Son

 

Skindeep 70 x 70 cm - mixed media on paper

 

 

 

AMERICAN DAD (A POSTHUMOUS LETTER)

 

Dear dad, don’t pull that guy

with slicked back hair through the window

of his idling Porsche. Don’t drop him on his face. Intersection

 

Hollywood & Vine, twelve lanes of traffic. Middle of the day!

Just because he flipped you off. And do

you have to shoot fur-bearing animals for fun

 

while you’re probably thinking about how many

hot dogs you’re going to gobble for lunch? Huh? How many

cups of coffee while you tell everyone at the diner

 

tales of your life, how you were in the 82ed Airborne, shook

JFK’s hand under the wing of a C-130 during the

Cuban missile crisis. How you cried when he was shot. Or

 

whenever you heard Caruso on the turntable. Like a Sicilian

hit man at his dying mama’s bedside. How you made everyone

seek cover as you sized them up as targets of opportunity

 

in the war of survival, or calculated the best

way to shoot down a young man’s lightly feathered ego.

                              from 23 on

                              I was gone

Still, there’s no getting away from these people. Sometimes when

I’m shaving, he says, Boy, you look just like me.  

 

 

Basic Black

 

Basic Black 70 x 50 x 1.8 cm - acrylic on canvas

 

 

W. T. F.

 

For about a half-hour once on a Venetian bridge

I felt like I was dying—no, not

dying, feeling lost in myself,

standing under a thousand pounds

of unnamable Dread. So I wasn’t on

one of those Death in Venice trips,

I merely felt that nothing mattered. But I don’t know why.

I’ve seen the denizens of a shopping mall in Oxnard.

I’ve seen a puddle of blood and the syringe that formed it

on a subway platform in Berlin. Not a shudder. But in Venice,

that ultimate Disneyland for aesthetes? I mean, what the fuck?

I don’t know why but I smoked for the first time

in my life on the steps in front of the train station

people lunging by on their way to Florence or Milan

or Munich, Pink Floyd playing on someone’s “ghetto

blaster”—it was the summer of “The Wall.”

And I still don’t know why

I was laughing uncontrollably while standing

in line outside a movie theatre in Pleasant Hill,

California, the heat crushing even children to silence.

Intoxicated by all that life force rushing without

hesitation or purpose through my 23 year old body,

finding it hilarious, I guess, to wait in 100 degree heat

for Indiana Jones to defeat the Third Reich. I didn’t even like Harrison Ford.

 

 

 

30 Licks

 

30 Licks 80 x 80 x 1,8 cm - mixed media on canvas

 

 

 

ENOUGH

 

Lately I prefer experience

portioned out like chicken nuggets,

i.e., in manageable chunks. Do not super-

size our life, I say, winking sarcastically

while shaving a last few stubborn hairs. 

I know some smallish towns that have

one of everything. Or two or three

or six. It’s always a question of appetite.

   Three miniscule pizzerias, say, 

   squeezed into

a baroque piazza’s mid-sized space. We know a woman

who maximizes all offers. She can leave

a salad bar in ruins. Or a man’s heart though

swearing she only wanted his penis. All You Can Eat

becoming I Can Eat All Of You. It’s possible to be

addicted to anything. Even desirable.

The third season of Madmen.  

Someone’s ridiculously attractive if sort of

scary smile. Because it is scary, because it seems

to promise more meaning than we can tolerate. Riding really

fast down a mountain side on a piece of technology

that will never go fast enough. Until it’s riding you.

Until it’s wrapped neatly around your neck. 

 

 

Sex on the beach

 

Peacock Alley 80 x 80 x 2 cm - mixed media on canvas

 

 

 

 

SEX ON THE BEACH

 

The word wonderful describes

being on the slow boat from

Athens to the islands. Her sleeping head

in my lap, eyelids trembling. Just yesterday

in London we were fighting. Got on/ off an airplane.

Boarded a big old rust bucket listing to starboard.

Souvlaki & bread. Plastic cup of Nescafe.

& presto we’re embedded in some magic.

 

On the boat I was reading

that a couple thousand years ago

men did the shopping & didn’t wear underpants

Socrates downloading his classic pick-up line

on a young man, “Where can I

find the Good & the Beautiful

my son?” & even getting directions there. Found them

near the Agora, spread out in the sun by an olive tree

learning the rules of logic while watching two oily  

adolescents wrestle in the dust. After, to the bath house.

 

Out where the blue of

water meets the blue of land

Athens destroyed the Persian fleet.

 

I think about Fate and Flux. But the Beautiful Goods intrude:

red sneakers, soft khaki shorts, tank-top enhanced assets.

 

A bird goes Ithaca! Ithaca! Ithaca! Then lifts off,

dropping a turd and three feathers. An omen?

 

Ships burning in the distance

are in truth pine trees enflamed by a brush fire.

 

Ten minutes from the skeletal, elegant temple of Apollo

was a cocktail called “Sex on the Beach.”

 

I still remember how that tasted.

 

 

John Updike in Bermudas

Spinster 100 x 80 x 2 cm - mixed media on linen canvas

 

 

 

THE 4th

 

It’s the 4^th, as it always is

this time of year, even the police

peaceful today handing out ice-cream to

graceful multi-hued children who have never

known public strangulation; for whom pepper spray

is something you squirt on your salad.

 

All trees are impressive here, really

big, excellent timber. There are no snipers in the branches.

And yet what if the wind fell through their leaves

then went ripping down the sidewalk  

blowing roughly one-third of Kansas

and a hefty chunk of Missouri off the map,

threatening Arkansas and impressive swaths

of Oklahoma with utter devastation? What would we do then?

 

I don’t know about you, but I would pour

another drink; let someone else deal with it. I gave

at the home office ha-ha. There’s plenty on my plate e.g.

“Next Door Liz” has just flashed me. Or am I hallucinating? Nope,

she gives an encore: up with the sun dress—no panties—

then down again. Another perilous day in the bush, my dear Livingston.  

Yo, Liz. Wassup? Such exuberance reminds me

of the 60’s. Depravity in the burbs redux; John

Updike in Bermuda shorts. True, Stockholm refused

to give him the Big One, but he did have fabulous legs.