what was and what will be
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What Suicided Van Gogh
group exhibitions, art advisory boards, exhibition history, ‘the Holy Land’, he was not in New York, engagement with art in a historical context, commentary on where the world was at, solo shows, young and hip groups of underground artist clusters, hard-working small-scale non-profit curators, curators at the Louvre, boards of directors, managers of auction houses, private art collectors, major players in the collectors’ market, marketing staff in galleries, Gauguin’s overpowering masculinity, dots in the foxgloves, Theo’s networking skills, the lack thereof, syphilis, gonorrhea, doctors and nurses, beliefs in the power of the health professionals, conviction that he would soon die, failure to have produced an outstanding artist statement, inability to communicate ideas except through paints and letters to Theo, anger management, other artists, Venus’ sublime torso, art entrepreneurs, art economics courses, definition of success and successful artist, working too hard, being too much on his own, the majority of the ravens above the wheat fields, humanity itself, art buyers’ sheepishness, horse hairs in their eyes, scorn of money, antisociability, anxiety gnawing like ants at his groins, thickness, too much fire—
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Adelaide, South
last night I drove through the waste of piss clouds, turdal pipes, rotten timber piles, spotted crates, wedged-in posts, gloryshining LED screens, cheap dirt vinyls, sullen windows, molten glass, inept unlit light bulbs, red steel frames looming over the empty carpark gravels, then the blue kenworth truck rode alongside our small white suzuki, grinding us spun in our own reflection, oh blasted concrete lumps, dreamy sexless machines, nozzle pumps droopy with fresh bitumen, flood lights roasting the moths, plastic & enamelled bridges spanning over graffitied creekbeds, soporific garden beds, unmade unslept-in empty beds of the barmaids, pole dancers, exotic shakers of tops and bottoms, undone catatonic beer bottles, blue faded lip & nose masks, surgical abandonment in our arms, bruises swelling up the busted veins, wheels rolled to the monologue of swaying gums, yellow & green along rivers, in the middle of a retired caravan park, South Road industrial complexes throwing russet bricks at the spurious drunkards, homeless man slumped over a plastic bag at 5 a.m. looking for a buzz, fields of weeds mingling seeds into the sleepy houses with flat roofs and undelineated eyebrows, vehicles like ours raging in the twenty-five to forty kilometre per hour crawl through unmalleable night works, charming chrysanthemums and roses bump up petrol prices, fake fur beanies, pink glazed donuts, eggless sandwiches, pungent coffee beans, brooding brooding brooding in their nest of cyanides, hotdog juices tomato sauces oozing all over the long legs of pretty-faced blonds, mouth twitching and long wretched earrings aching in the buildings down for rent, agents smile for a while and walk off, call, no one answers but he the black bird, saloons are closing, security looks you up and down, another cigarette for the quarantine hotel staff in full regalia to fight biological hazards, buses wait for passengers, passengers wait for buses, the Aborigines, the blacks the whites the yellow sun, never setting, sitting under the trees on the Terraces, another night where the plovers can’t be heard, the flying fox chased away by antenna searches, salt bush berries gone berserk, hibiscus, bottlebrushes, paperbarks, heat wave of garbage scents consecrated in the breeze, high strung humidity, cool in an untimely way, outlier in statistics cuts across spaces, between earth and stars, all the roads are straight, all the blocks are shapes, angularly cars meet highways, dash to the next street, somewhere at sea, ocean liners leave the shore, sultry nuances drowning under palms and bleed out at midnight from fingertips, another ennui beaten into the roundabouts, another Friday night for the world’s infamous two-dimensional place
ah our City of Churches
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Eyewitness Travel Guide’s Tale
Penny hasn’t got a penny
Danny boy doesn’t give a damn
Daisy goes cruising in a frenzy
Tintin was erected by the men
No one in the country has ever heard
of a hydroelectro eco-friendly dam in China
Everybody goes drinking in pubs
Happiness is tattooed on calves and foreheads
Peaches taint the sun tans and
Leeches bleach the foreskins
Skinheads go dancing in the twilight with the la-la girls
Tarzan goes aping himself in a comedy show on late-night
television
Harley dreams of killing himself but doesn’t do it for some reason
Jasmine blossoms through cracks in fences, can’t get fired at work
Holy churches the uncles bring Inessa to see
in the mountainous countryside of Italy
but all she wants is to put her feet up and sleep!
Castles, sunflowers, bagpipes, maps
of canals, streets, bridges, alps, and
evergreen forests, German beers and sausages, caryatids
with enormous draperies and tits, Inuits moving
South into bungalows next to glowworms,
skyscrapers and four-wheel-drives with tinted windows
in the snow!
Mona Lisa is going crazy from being photographed with flashes
Rembrandt is indignant that the house he was evicted from
became a Rembrandt House Museum after his death . . .
Vincent . . . not to mention your Arles, Antwerp, wheat fields
the sea and its surges . . .
they overwhelm like fireworks
Maps maps maps
Wouldn’t you like to sleep in the snow of Vienna
skate down a river in Denmark
predicting the world is going to end?
Military motions rank in voltages as in a circuit/circus
Autistic children’s parents pay 75 dollars an hour
to get the kids trained like dogs to appear normal
robotic
with no feelings in particular areas
to ‘fit in’
and when they scream (the kids, not the parents)
they crowd in a flood
and can scream for the entire sixty minutes (of 75 bucks)
Hong Kong is burning
like London burned
like Paris burned
like all the previous revolutions that succeeded or failed
it would tap the surface that ripples while the big fish
stay cool in the dark currents under rocks and in the shadows
of the trees, untouched, keeping cool, feeling smug . . .
The people . . . like a rope, chain or windlass
slip into valleys and are never to resurface without fear&/
indignation . . .
The fountains dry from old age
Like rise and fall of oars above waves
We tip back with a jerk and feel awake
only to be dunked again into the cesspool of human wastes . . .
Something is partly alive
Erasing all our earliest senses
Replaces them with a great force finding no easy direction anywhere
Consequently causes us to burst . . .
We catch every blow
because it is not just the curse of our day
but a carelessness on the offensive without origin since the beginning of anything . . .
Devils look on with irritation
Their tails curled like chameleons’
They’re not smiling
Funeral rites are figurative, repetitive, boring
Music coming from a chimney
Bells deafening the dandelions
The people miserably booed
walk down streets after fires that burned for hours or days or weeks without real
imperatives
Someone was going back to the office
to rescue a stray cat that recently gave birth in a cardboard box
Police fired teargas and wished they could go home and sleep
The offices, the campuses, the subways, the trains
all gone.
The cats are not stupid.
They went into hiding long ago.
Hence when that someone went back to the office
risking his life in the fire, the cat
was nowhere
to be found.
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