billyfivecrows

third poem for Jim Carroll

"...and you're jaunty and
elegant and confused and
witty and

you set fire

to your own skull..."

In recent
Photos
You look like
T.S. Eliot's
Old
Lesbian
Sister. So

You've outlived
And out
Lined your
Rage, gummed

Everything twice
With
Full
Sharp
Soft
Razor
Teeth.

I'm tired of you in blackened puropse.

We're down here a lot. I'm tired of me. Let's

Talk.

Demonic commentator.
Common denominator. Both

Of us are Saint George

To dragons

In our systems. Mine
Is made of grain, yours

Is made of
Poppies. Thoughtfully

I say such beasts
Should be
Benign. Plantlife.

Plant life
And it
Grows. (That's

A line with no
Personality. A long

Carrot-red
Dawn
And I'll think

Of another. I like

Your hair. No

I'm not a dyke, and

Neither are you but,

We both know

Sappho, so
Keep me

Company as I
Walk
Waiting

In this heavenly

Wasteland...)




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Note: The word 'dyke' in this poem is meant to be read in a loose, street-talk sort of fashion, and as a point in thread along with the 'T.S. Eliot's lesbian sister' and Sappho lines. A great number of my friends over the years have been gay women, so no animosity here.

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Willingly insomniacal. 6.58 am. Up browsing paintings on the 'net. Ran into some early Per Kirkeby from '67 or so. The obvious and direct figuration doesn't quite cut it. You can see the beginnings of where he would be in mature career: the brushy hinting at landscape and natural form that never quite leaves the safety of the brushstroke, refusing to satisfy the eye's pandering to the minds want of familiarity. Painterly static of pre- or post-form energy. I like his more purely abstract work much much better.

Big Anselm Kiefer's. Thick, crusty, sandy-beige and white-blackish-ochre flecked pyramids on desert sky-mind scape. Immense. Some of them bigger than movie screens. Each brick present, three- and two-dimensional at once. Thick and flat; encrusted. What would structure and debris be without Kiefer. I'd love to see a big retrospective of his work. I'd especially like to see the large, crude, lead fighter planes with long, billowy hair streaming from the tailpipe area and flowing across the floor.

Some Schnabel's I'd never seen before. A plate portrait, and a large oil on velvet from '82 that echoes that particular Imi Knoebel series of Mondrian meets Clifford Still brushy divison of surface with lots of negative space. This painting gets into the typical messiness and automatism that characterizes those early velvet paintings, but without the overlapping and morphing faces that graced so much work from that period and before. Mostly just dry line and scratch with rough square and rectangle connected by more line. Ellipsis and figure eights, of course. Wouldn't be mid-early Schnabel without them.

Kiki Smith's 'Jersey Crows' is one of my fondest loves.


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