Don't Fear the Reaper

 

Love 50 x 40 acrylic on canvas

KALI IN SUBURBIA

I adore afternoons that feel like a lazy saxophone

solo, it’s hot, we’re all eating shrimp. A fat uncle

smoking a Cuban cigar, everything’s great

till someone says Have you heard the one about…

Live dangerously is my motto.

I love stumbling

giddy and laughing out my

lover’s backdoor, half naked,

headlights illuminating family portraits.

You feel uneasy with me at times, don’t you?

That’s because I destroy evil in all its

guises. I can smell it the way you can smell

pheromones, opportunity, a whiff of high quality weed

coming from your child’s untidy bedroom.

If you really knew me you wouldn’t

want me standing like a pile of toxic

debris in a corner of your cocktail party.

But what you don’t know is that I would

be a perfect maid-of-honor or witness at

your Vegas wedding, posting everything on Instagram.

Still, you don’t know me, not really, or yourself,

or how much your frat boy brat was drinking

before he slipped out with the car keys

that evening that ended so badly. 

Magenta's Lips

 

Autumn Rose 100 x 70 cm - acrylic on paper

LIPS

I’m trying to teach her the Genitive.

Words form slowly between the

suspiciously puffy lips of this powerful  

woman ruffling her cape. Her red cape.

There is an intimation of super powers.

I’m trying to teach her the Dative.

Her lips are absurdly bountiful.

Bountiful as America. American lips.

They are real, hyperreal, surreal. She says.  

I tend to believe her. Maybe she

grew up near a nuclear power station.

Or a toxic waste processing plant located behind leaky walls.

Aesthetically mutated by gradual disaster?

I’m trying, I swear, to teach her.

She only learns what she wants to learn.

They’re all

coming of age now, a pessimistic optimism

bubbling up and down a scale I can’t keep up with, still dressed

in flip flops and leggings and Ray-Bans even though

more than a few are turning forty next month, slurping

coffee, checking

their phones, indestructible, I mean

partially impermeable.