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.