Slam-spanking hip,
a gin-grin.
Curled tubes, smeared.
Canvas rub-smudge, prismatic.
Called art when tequila worms
were the main course.
Madness benign,
lurked beneath your tray,
collage cubism you would slur
and the gallery bohemians would sip
dry white

pretending they knew their asses
from their trust funds.
Your painted nudes with middles
of mashed potatoes
and rhombus shaped tits
smirked in faceted wedges
tempered in sfumato.

Not Les Demoiselles d''Avignon
by any stretch of the canvas
although you shared in the barbarian form,
aggressive interpretation, quixotic.

You mainlined distilled grains
like a morphine drip.
Methadone memories
tripped
your schizophrenic fingers
into lightning strokes of color.
Rouge-faced, merlot lips, lemon-skinned,
and your whores disguised as nudes,
descending.


What You Did Not See

The subject was the shell,
intrinsic in a life carved ancient.
You couldn't see the beauty,
the gaping jaw bone
a skeletal masterpiece
swirled
in a sea of Plesiosaurs.

Only a shell, you said,
a husk of imagination.

Blanched, a frozen hinge at one end,
toothless like a hand puppet.
You knew I ate the salted meat
careful not to disturb its body.
I could paint eyes, nostrils,
and a green body with flippers.
You would still only see the pistachio.


.

John Heckman