featuring Nico .. .

Around this woollen ball, this puff of life
jangled strings zip, zang across the bridge
echoed voices caught tap tapping on the backboard
white noise an alternating love song

Did you get inside Picasso’s head or Blake
Hockney’s swimming pool remote and lonely
emulsioned out for all to see, not for posterity
who knew the tempera here was set politically

I heard voices in the wild wind ever closer
then revolution was not so a dirty word
violence, obsequious, fabulous, absurd
ampersand the currency of other lands

Safe, narwhaled from our pleasant sundays
village greened, cosied into thirties constructs
like cricket whites b-4 adopting denim jeans
markered CND’s upon angst-filled dreams

Hardwood stage, the age, loose-fit abstract
queen Nico, minimalist, name-checked as an entity
symbolism birthed, seeded by some advertiser’s junk
boys q’p’s, girls capital V’s, coin-slot teasers

Happy to be, therefore I am, persuaded by a Cambells can
or a gym shoe, art’s pale face peroxided over
who took up the mantle or a cudgel to the head
these were artist’s who by art systematically bled!

We were constantly drifting, our life-raft listing
leave me with my bands, my ties, my addictions
I was once like you, a son, fair full of constancy
my meat hung low but rose to all occasions

Now I am meat for the wagon that can never know
where it might end, discarded like a banshee’s wail
in sunny climes, Andalusian, stoned, harpooned
washed up, in the year of getting your shit together

I am a statement written out in purpled blood
shored up by virtue, consecrated, left for dead
I float east where the water turns mauve to angry red
and yellow, orange, white, psychedelic blue

We together formed forever the perfect group
remembered by our perfect name, our Dada beat
icons signatured at Caffe Bizarre on West 3rd street
audiences dazed and damaged when then departed

©edenbraytoday03.12.2022