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.

Coming into Focus

 

Coming into Focus 60 x 60 cm mixed media - available -

QIANA                       

                                                                          A lightweight

                                                               manmade fiber chemically classed

                                                                            as nylon.

                                                                                    THE RANDOM HOUSE DICTIONARY

After the confusion is packed away—

precipitated by an Erik Rohmer girl  

blessed with the morals of late antiquity, say,

and bitter little pouches beneath

her eyes—and we ship it off like toxic waste

to a needy, cash-poor country

in equatorial Africa, we learn

to stretch our muscles in new ways,

in new words. The garden seems fresher then,

the Philosopher takes his pleasure calmly

and the Poet takes dictation calmly, and we take a break

from the daily idiocy, which sounds like a newspaper

and sometimes is, the colors astoundingly attentive

to our needs, like lovers, like lovers who really love us,

though no one in her right mind could possibly love me

nor you, for that matter, sorry, nor him nor her,

apologies, I mean come on is anyone really lovable

I think Ann Carson admitted in the Paris Review

that she’s a monster, that all of us are monsters

which is exactly what you might expect a classics professor/modernist poet

to say, that is, bronze age fatalism plus Avant-garde

pessimism equals: it doesn’t matter what and how

much we sacrifice to the gods our blue print

is left unaltered, that is, human beings

are excellent at making poems, pictures, bombs

and we can be so so so beautiful

but as far as living life goes, well, we’re pretty much

fuck ups, often getting stuck on issues such as

what would you do if all of your shirts were

made of nylon? There you are, sweating in the high school gym

dancing to ELO, the Bee Gees, almost happy. Everything

glistening, like ice, like a nylon shirt, like a headache

in the south of France—not enough bread, sweetie, or cheese— and I  

hadn’t a sou, and there’s hardly a fate worse than being hungry   

and sou-less in France, and because the old men were smoking their little

cigars in the 2nd class waiting room, laughing, having a hell of a good time. 

Help Me

 

Ausgeschnitten - Carved out 23 x 50 cm pastel - available -

THE POET

This executive of eloquence

and he’s empty as a spoon.

Still, he’d like to mount the Erechtheum;

the Himalayas to know his weight; dip his toes in the Seine.

Nobody would dare ask him where in God’s name

he was taking them ( thematically, stylistically, wherever)

or why he can’t find anyone to iron his shirts.

He dreams of fireflies in an enchanted wood above Camogli.

He dreams of tenure. He dreams of liberating

an exotic waitress—Surinam? Macao?—enslaved

by a pancake house in Soda Springs, Illinois. He dreams

of one bottle of “Opus One” Cabernet Sauvignon. Then of two bottles

he dreams. He dreams of Cordoba, the orange trees there,

the white courtyards with tiled staircases that go

nowhere unclean, whiffs of jasmine, roasted chicken, garlic.

In his current day dream

lights are being strung from everything

in a dusty piazza, Calabria, baroque village, pagan celebration

   of some Christian holy day,

1957. The air is dry. Black haired women, warm

and moist, wearing floral-print dresses, their elegant

men dressed in white shirts and woolen slacks

with hideously elongated flies. We have no idea why

we’re here but the wine is cheap

and a few of the girls, appearing to need love,

pull us down with delicate urgency

to their talcum-powdered breasts.

In the light of a bonfire, and just what one

would expect, the village church is a

crumbling wedding cake; for about fifteen-minutes—

thanks, Andy—everyone’s a poet.