Still Life with Skull (1908)

try listening to the dead man,
the one with a skull
off-center, grieving over a still life!
5 paint brushes in his hand and not a single knife
near a morning window;
the mailman on rounds,
walking slowly to visit Picasso,
found the body hanging in the Bateau Lavoir studio:
androgynous-looking, bizarrely dressed,
it was Karl-Heinz Wiegels,
full of something besides art and himself;
bought from friends or pulled from a shelf.
successive doses of opium, hashish, or ether
and a healthy shot of schizophrenia
in browns, blues, yellows, and red:
no one heard what last words

might have been said.