Invitation

Das Licht auf der anderen Seite - The Light on the other Side 52 x 36 cm

INVITATION

I used to like people, would dream about them…mindlessly…magnificent

animals is what Nietzsche called us, and I even acquired a few of my own, kept them

around the house till, half-past dead with boredom, I had just enough strength

   left to throw them out. Like most empires at a certain stage

of their decline, I dream mainly of food, small pleasures, tiny divertimenti.

And alcohol. And the wild weed I cultivate amid corn and cucumbers. But now that

you’ve wandered in…my new friend!...let’s hang out together beneath the trellis

and eat olives and feta cheese in a cucumber salad and drink retsina and smoke from

the pipe of wisdom. Maybe I’ll give you that massage I promised in a moment

of mindless lust. Let’s talk of old times we’ve never shared

because the best parties are sometimes those that have no reason to exist…like some

poems…then I’ll switch on the boogie box…can’t imagine never dancing again. You? 

Let's Dance - David Bowie

Vanity, thy name be ....

Franken - Franconia 48,5 x 38,5 cm

SINECURE

It’s not that I have anything against work, per se,

but what I need is a patron not some Vice-President

   for fuck all 

pulling my chain whenever he feels like it. There’s a character somewhere    

   in Henry James, I think, who claims that he  

does not entertain ideas, ideas entertain him. Now that’s a position I can

still get into. But the issue before us, as the chairman of some

   highly self-important panel might pronounce,

is financial and not ontological or even epistemological

and phenomenology is just a picture in your own mind 

   of what constitutes the “really” real

which apparently is unknowable and I can do better than that:

   what would it take to receive living

expenses plus a simple comfy old house, with a courtyard

and beautiful tiles and Moroccan pillows all over the place

and a flat, spacious roof on which to sleep nights during the hot months

   and this located in a palm

   olive grove within sauntering

distance of the medina or acropolis? I’m not so much

philosophical as complicatedly blown away by the physical

   world and most of its moving parts. Still, I think some foundation

could plausibly make me Dean of Poetry in Absentia

   at the Library of Alexandria, or appoint me

Secretary General of the Union of Disaffected Aesthetes,

College of Arts & Letters,

                                           University of California, Berkeley

whose principle duty would be to write a yearly essay on the state of his Sensibility.

   Let me swim around in a think tank

all barnacled with concepts, clichés, marching orders, systems

   of tightly organized, internally concocted   

delirium. If you required more I could easily offer you

a re-write of the Classical Tradition and even a few of its

more amusing offshoots, my version, for instance, of the long lost

dialogues of Socrates after the orgy, or even confessions  

   of the Buddha before he went straight.

Open your blinds, that’s me in the street,

   waving and waiting for the sun

to warm my blood, inspired as ever,

                                                      as swift as Sugar Ray in his prime.

Carly Simon - You're so vain