Self-Portrait

i watched a raconteur
and his lower lip
speaking with a generous heart
upside down and back to front.
he proposed to offer me a new head start.
i asked him for a different angle,
not a simple circle or a square;
even the confident critics wondered:
will anything important ever be found there?
but i was determined to stay
because most of my friends were already away,
and once as a very young man
i sang soprano in my Sunday choir
with everyone God-like no one a liar.
often trying to wheedle my way
to the front of every unpainted line,
i was in a hurry not wholly by design,
eating flat bread and sipping wine.
i didn't have much intellectual integrity;
was heavily wounded in a war.
when asked to kill wondered what the hell for?
listening to the famous bugles call,
there was more to dying than what i saw:
the saxophones performing in toxic smoke;
and song birds hitting high C as they choke
on a very rough patch of desert sand.
i heard him once say this was the Promised Land!
while others might find that hard to understand;
the only clue i have is my name
on the bottom right-side of a stretched canvas
where my thumb plays a hide and seek game
with the palette by always changing colors
or do they simply stay the same?