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. 

L O V E

Blick von Deya - Deya-Vista 28,5 x 38,5 cm

LOVE

It’s good work if you can get it—

that’s what a skeptic might say—but it doesn’t

pay the rent, my friend, it’s all perks, a jazz quartet

in the lobby of a hipster hotel in lower Manhattan

playing the coolest of Brubeck and Miles

and Charles Mingus too, yes, Charles himself. Sometimes love is

fried scampi with pinot grigio—ah, my love, we adore delicious

food, middle-age entering its Major Phase in silk dressing gown  

as a paunchy, grandly decayed author dictating to his assistant

the Great Unreadable Cookbook—goat cheese

spread on slices of sour dough bread warming us 

up, “as it were,” for wild boar stuffed with rum soaked plums.

Love is Olivia Hussey in Zeffirelli’s “Romeo and Juliet,” she with eyelashes

like wings shadowing cheekbone and dimple. Even though I

detested the “school dance” and all it stood for—one nation under

teenage stupidity, with liberty and justice for no one else    

but dumb-assed jocks, of course, and the girls who     

jerked them off in Mustangs, Firebirds, on front porch swings—

I would have taken Olivia to the Junior Prom: so there she is

spreading ripples of dismay and desire and astonishment

at the freshness of her beauty, her iambic pentameter   

otherness. I hear a sprinkler sputter-stutter into life, a basket-

ball pounding in the driveway, “Whole lotta Love” ripping through

my open bedroom window. The world’s going nuts, but this time it’s not so bad.    

 

Glory Box - Portishead