Working on the Weekend

Fantasia 30 x 40 cm - watercolour/ink/gesso - painting by Karin Goeppert

JOBS

Take this paycheck and stick it where

the sun doth shine—and p’raps it

will grow some zeros there. I’m one of those

who still believes in photosynthesis.

Worked the early shift yesterday,

found to my bitter disappointment that there was

no double-time left over, not a scrap, just time-and-a half

though none for me. “You came early,” grunted

the shift patriarch, “go on home and take care of your kids.”

But I need some moneys, I need some moneys bad.

My kids are a going concern. They deal by the monkey bars in the park.

One big difference between Old World and New: Hispanic women

clean the toilets of tax consultants in La Jolla, while in Brussels

slender-armed Slavic chicks scrub, after using, the bidets of inflated Eurocrats.

Speaking of occupational hazards, subtle distinctions, etc.,

someone who was in the army once told me that right after landing

airborne soldiers almost always pee: 800 paratroopers

urinating on a sandy drop-zone in North Carolina. The world

is weird and wonderful. Sometimes. Every Friday we get free beer. If not

for that I’d have quit years ago. Not precisely weird but exactly wonderful.

As it appears YouTube has blocked us. So no music at the moment.

We might just change the name of the blog! ;-)

Venetian State of Mind

Lagune - Lagoon 50 x 60 cm by Karin Goeppert

VENETIAN

Maybe I should mention American

universities and banks, how they fake

Venice: gothic windows, phallic bell

towers, all those genre pieces

of plaster and brick, a gondolier in the Dean’s

office, in the lobby, whistling a Corelli concerto—

and there’s this stretch of marble and stained glass

in Hamburg that’s not a bad knock off at all.

Which brings to mind John Ruskin who thought

that Venice was a simulacrum of itself. Also a fake.

Nobody cares anyway. Could be Disney Land

or Vegas, just another place to go.

Attractive to honeymooners, to depressed aesthetes.

Somewhere in history

a fat man’s being led out for the last time, his last time,

hands bound, and the fat lady

is about to sing, and that the Bridge

of Sighs has the last laugh is an

irony much admired in these parts.

Want you scampi or Bellini? Says the Harlequin.

He means the composer, of course. Even an execution

is an overture of sorts, a flourish, the beginning of something. 

In der Wildnis - In the Wilderness 29 x 29 cm - pastel by Karin Goeppert

ORIENT ESPRESSO

It’s hot and wet, water dripping

from palm leaves, thought as dull as the glint

in a water buffalo’s stupefied eye

Mekong Delta, Kandahar, Sunni Triangle

reflected therein when you are knee deep in 

one of Uncle Sam’s disasters or have just enough luck

to be smoking a joint alongside the Ganges  

while some private first-class grunt

crawls through the elephant grass

there’s always someone who’s had the runs since ’68

and could really use a shower

and some tapioca pudding too and

a little R&R, perhaps, China Beach for the grunts and Goa

for the spiritual type whose knees hurt from prolonged

meditation, and the fragrance of fabric softener

on a summer morning in Des Moines—that would be nice, too.

Dazed and Confused for so long it's not true....

Daphne auf Yupo - Daphne on Yupo 32 x 22 cm by Karin Goeppert

GRUNT

You didn’t actually jump

out of an airplane, you merely shuffled

till you ran out of floor, then you were

out there banging along the “skin”

of the aircraft, paralyzed

by a panic of such sublimity you’re unable

to remember what it felt like, silk opening

more or less horizontally,

saved again.

You hit the sand, brushed off,

took a leak, moved on to the tree line, shot an

azimuth—a compass reading, not a local animal—

even so you often got lost

in some awful swamp at Fort Polk, Louisiana,

in the poison ivy of Fort Benning, Georgia,

in the Columbian girls of the Canal Zone

at ten-bucks a pop the best bargain in town

got lost in them too, lost among civilians

at the National Gallery in D.C. who mocked you when

much too wasted on Mexican weed and Southern Comfort 

and something else which, symptomatically enough, you don’t  

remember, you looked at the pictures too up close and

slipped through the cracks of badly restored Old Masters

or the girl in Carmel who once said, unhappily, disgustedly

even, “Are you lost? I didn’t know people like you came here.”

Dazed and Confused - Led Zeppelin 

Jeep's Blues

Die letzte Welle - The last Wave 38,5 x 48,5 cm by Karin Goeppert

THE SEARCH

The man who was talking to her said

he once sat naked in candlelight

for hours on a cold hardwood floor   

till someone came along and remarked,

“Maybe you should get out more often.”

He had spent two years in Burma, meditating

every day all day, before returning home to Illinois,

nerves uprooted, digestive tract in an uproar.

“We in the West tend to be literal minded,” he said.

“And greedy. We always want too much of a good thing.”

At a Zen Do in Kyoto the native monks

sneak out for the Japanese equivalent of fried steak

as the Dutch novice slurps down some rice and vegetable

concoction.  Asked to come along, he’s indignant.

J.S. Bach, on night duty at the church boarding school,

composes a cantata silently to himself while listening

to children dream. My half-brother Gary, a little 

league pitcher of some promise, ruins his right arm.

After surgery his parents have him out in the yard

throwing with his left arm. “Why have you come to us?” the

Zen master asks the Dutch novice. “I am searching for

the meaning of life.”—“The meaning of life?” asks the

master. “Ah, that’s easy.” A strict little frown. “Life is a joke. But it

takes much time and hard work and meditation to find this out.”

Far as I know he’s still out there searching for the punch line.  

Jeeps Blues by Duke Ellington