Portrait of Andre Derain (1919)

was it le gros
or was it le petit
who each night fell in love
with a new English girl,
forgetting momentarily about the war in France?
ah, it was Derain.
he did resent Picasso for having it
easy, for avoiding the trenches that Braque
and he had been stuck in.
but that was then and this was now, walking
to the National Gallery with Pablo but without Olga.
and Pablo was generous, sketching a black pencil on paper
portrait of him which was of exceptional strength.
soon, Derain would marry Alice, who had formerly been
a Picasso mistress.
but that was then and this was now.
Le petit was the Spaniard, who had no studio in London.

Derain was the wild beast who painted in Collioure

with the colorful Matisse,

long before Still-life with Dead Game

was awarded the Carnegie Prize.

deep song

the knots were nicely made,
tighter than usual.
she wondered if i liked them
and of course i did, so
she pulled her hat down
to just above her raw eyes
and entered into her gypsy world.
she started to dance the flamenco and cante jondo
on my back, where my hands stayed tied.
being unable to stand, i arched my eyebrows
to the click of her heels beating into my skin.
in our summer heat, she tossed her clothes
during the prolonged spanking of my whimpering ass.
i wanted to take notes of the minutest details of her technique,
but she swallowed my material, and so i never
learned the flamenco, although i know why her dress was red.
which is all the more reason for me to learn how to sing.

writer's digestion

i heard he smoked a pipe with reverence,
holding one in a state of respectful admiration.
so sweet that draw, deep and dark,
into his healthy lungs forever and forever
he would suck
until the chill cooled the fire.
and i heard he wrote lines of verse,
employed an intuitive eye, and believed that
his mind was farsighted.
he saw the smoke rub around his nose,
and curl effeminately into the watching eye.
i heard he had a following, too, and was selected
9th and 11th place out of a possible 50,
once upon a time.
and his pipe was content as his fingers held the stem,
stroked the bowl, and inhaled  the deep and the dark.
he never seemed superstitious about the smoke, which
like a little cat, purred against his happy face.

the reading

it wasn't loud enough.
the near window didn't shake with envy or fatigue
because the vibrations weren't strong when
they should have been thunderous,
but slipped rather like a soft mouse around a corner
in an undertone of nervousness;
or like a quiet frog eyeballs fixed atop his water lily pad beneath the
purple blooming Hosta along the shoreline.
the public reading was sublime, marvelously so for an hour
and it was very good as each guest enthusiastically congratulated
the reader who,
with a glance in my direction, looked for approval.
it was a modest event, however, and i felt no need to walk into that trap,
so i held myself very straight, radiating neutrality.
even in certifiably intellectual surroundings, such as a bookshop or
a library, the voice should attack the words in earnest.
and it's even more imperative when there is weight to be throw around.

my preference

well, i certainly didn't want any trouble at the frontier
or crossing the border,
so i was tempted to leave myself behind,
clothed or nude it wouldn't matter.
imagine, i feared, having to explain to a bearded young
customs man
why my hands seemed so soft and competent?
most likely i would be tempted to screw him over, shouting incoherent French.
and if he began to ask personal questions, it could go badly for me.
but i did have one regret, despite my love of adventure,
and that was the separate rooms i was being forced to live in.
and if officialdom mistook me for a man of substance,
then everything would change.  so i had to be careful.
my first concern was to be clean and well-fed, and after that
the thoughtful delights of a less luxurious brothel were at least affordable
and kept me in a good frame of mind.
i didn't need a library, for God's sake! but simply better shelter.
and for that, i shouldn't need to cross over or
make a nighttime trip in the pelting rain.
and with approaching old age,
maybe i wouldn't die, after all,
which is my preference.
so i studied the travel guides.

Blue and Yellow

the journalists who usually trail me
failed to notice the wound on my right side,
where i hide my heart.
it was early summer, and the sidewalk cafes
were full of tourists looking for warmth on
the nearby beach, so it was easy to disguise
my true feelings.
sculpture was uppermost in my mind, as
i would glue, sew, and otherwise fasten bits
and pieces of myself onto a hasty mental construct
while sipping my morning coffee, when i had some.
and if i rose to walk, my limp was hardly visible,
since everyone was watching the sun, wondering when it
would blur the gap between the here and the now.
once, the moon appeared above the dark ocean and it
raced through the clouds, like a ball.
noticing that, i grabbed a stick and drew in the sand,
just as i used to do as a child.
and in that moment, i felt no pain.

at the age of 16

the soft Transylvania vampire
sucked my hot blood in buckets
from a book shelf lined with Greek classics
where Sophocles wrote his plays during the day
as a bag of woe hung limply from his veins.

i looked into her bat eyes before any drama could be
realized by the addition of a third actor
and became lost in an ancient romance
when her microphone was stuck inside my ass
where even in the darkness everything could be explained.

but at the age of 16 only fragments still remained
of what i wanted to be when the sun would fully shine
while in the shadows of my war a hard rope held my soul
by the door where a machine gun was tied around my neck
and the helicopter flew into a terrible rage.

i lived to be 90 or 91 i can't remember which but the really
remarkable thing was that i wrote many good tragedies
while pissing on a neighbor's green grass in a suburban area where
European cars were thoroughly washed every Saturday
and vampires were thought to only live in books.

Agent Orange

Agent Orange proved to be a nasty fucker
killing millions of trees, leaves, and flowers
over the course of years and weeping hours
turned simple mud into blood
killed soldiers
gave them cancer
medical science no answer
killed Vietnamese by the score
and even more and more
babies
no ifs ands buts or maybes
animals dead (that's what i said)
environmental degradation
a democratic nation?
a huge violent 'Spray of Shit'
to win the war
the Vietnam War
with many immoral activities:
what?  salute the American flag
or frag
the NCOs or the officer
who wanted to be over there!
Lieutenant  Calley,
what's the final tally?
and at the USO show,
fiinding no humor on the stage,
the great screams of outrage
became empty uniforms
packing for home,
address unknown.