Dear Diego
first, you are my third eye
garish lures me and
the thrill of saturation
you cover shadows
that make us see
you love my invalid
I cannot trail you
and when I can…
you see how you hurt me
you sputter pity
into a dancing girl
her mouth puckers
at your proletarian cartoons
diego, from my crisp white bed
I smell your sweat at dawn’s
return, spent, belly full
your back as upright
as our imagined country
your drunken prick
sets my jaw hard and far
as a dock collapsed
in the mouth of my crimson lake
I plead true beauty
you need what has not turned
footloose larvae
in high-heeled shoes
waiting to chew your coat
folk man, you out-drank them all
and took what was left
women thought that floating brown eye
saw salvation, men saw manhood
watch me revive
my antidote of turpentine
paint the capitulation of my pain
diego: green and white and red
I am purple as a parrot
with a ringtail master
side-wounded as the serpent after Eve
you see how it is, how inside
I labor your gray scale
how outside my colors weld
veiled in my cradle
already I drew like you
outlining bricks and faces
ladling them well-fed
this keeps you near and sends you out
I could have painted your murals
with my ruptured foot
but I lay for lust to lift me
above my beds of pain
our teeter-totter life
won’t dull me
my legacy to you
you cannot tame me
and all my weeping faces
Copyright 1998, K. K. Todorovich
K. K. Todorovich has recently
been published in Visions International, Storyboard Magazine,
and Ekphrasis.
Switched-on Gutenberg
Thematic Contents / Vol. 3, No. 2 Back / Forward |