The Price of Art - Commercial Success Kills Another Artist

The Price of Art / Commercial Success Kills Another Artist

 

1/

I got the movie

“The Basketball Diaries”

I bought it from K-Mart

 

I wonder if the shareholders know

 

while they’re sitting there

in middle class splendour,

counting their dividends,

and cursing their tax man,

I’m watching a crazed drug fiend

bash rebarbative

on his mother’s door,

looking for an angry fix.

 

2/

I stole some art

and deprived the artist of income,

but Nevermind the artist’s dead,

fashioned himself into

a martyr for an unknown generation,

though I do feel bad I deprived a

              major corporation of royalties.

 

3/

Commercial Success Kills Another Artist.

Starved from starving. Exploded.

Blinded after darkness.

 

Suffered a corporate soul extraction

with a stylus tipped syringe,

chemically reproduced

for the herd to devour.

 

Feral primal measure

replaced by a mission statement based pentameter.

 

Weighed down by grammys.

Sank in the flow of royalties.

 

4/

Ginsberg tore me,

Carroll restore me,

Charles Bukowski

is Henry Chinaski.

 

Kurt Cobain

died in vein

‘cause in his vein

was heroine.

Why Do We Do It

Why Do We Do It?

Why do we answer the chatter in our heads,

why do we soil white paper,

giving birth on a page,

painful labour not helped by Lamaze.

Why do we send our children out to suffer

what we must suffer.

We could be doctors or bankers

or deal with the politics of the world,

or the pure mathematics of the universes.

Sometimes it would be easier to part a sea

than have to bury another child under the epitaph

‘thank you but space is limited.’

Hote Hell

Hote Hell

 

The walls bleed hate

in this god forsaken place,

taps drip with torturous monotony,

they've short sheeted my bed

to mess with my head

and effect a frontal lobotomy.

Life by Remote Control

Life by Remote Control

 

Ensconced in the images.

Injections from the 40 inch frame

across the room.

 

Bourgeois buttocks comfortable

on a lounge cut from old growth

forest by third world underaged.

 

Watch the news for sports updates,

interspersed with messages of the

latest products, requirements for a

new and improved reduced fat life.

Abject images are quickly flicked.

 

Reality TV

is an oxy   moron.

Dust

Dust

 

I drove through the dense dust

carried to Sydney on western winds

leaving antique coverings.

 

As the sun supposedly rose,

the air changed from pitch to a sepia brown,

framed in forgotten photography

 

The traffic slowed to a crawl

I lowered the window to have a cigarette

and felt injected into a horror movie.

 

Everyone driving the one road

to escape the evil entity

that had descended.

 

I tuned my radio

to listen for messages

of Armageddon.

 

Through the city streets

branches had fallen in overnight conflict,

leaf corpses lay strewn across roads,

and emergency services sirens

howled in the distance.

Reversion (Ode to the Lackadaisical)

 

Reversion (Ode to the Lackadaisical)

 

Cry, scream, bleed,

              as the sun sinks behind

              the horizon’s teeth.

 

Ancient shapes appear in the darkness,

              raining

              their two thousand year old warning.

 

The past, present and future mould

              into a surge of grey.

              -like a cyclone.

 

A man screams as his toes are ripped out

              by the jaws of a mechanical beast,

              and are melted, to be used in car manufacture.

 

A baby cries as his breast is taken,

              his mother is to be used

              welding weapons for the poor.

 

I laugh and joke with my next door neighbour

              over the fence as we have a beer,

              “it’s been quite a good year.”

 

The soil turns to rock before my eyes,

              the leaves are turning brown,

              I’m feeling rather sleepy.

Some People

 

Some People

 

Some people

clean their cars,

paint and polish them.

 

Some people

iron their shirts,

putting razor crisp edges into the sleeves.

Some people shave their faces.

 

Some people

build their careers,

becoming more and more important

with each step

they take.

 

Some people

go to church

and can wash the sins of a weak

in one Sunday mourning.

 

Some people

choose to lose.

Addictions.

Lost At Sea

Lost At Sea

 

Scatter scumdumps on the sand,

              step in sea, be crushed,

words in air, blow and freeze,

              to a melancholic mush.

 

Foamy kisses caress bones,

              fluorescent orange life jacket sag,

remnants of ocean meal strewn,

              beaches face, a hag.

 

In seaweed, mulch, hair long, knotted,

              a skull hides to decay,

velcro to sand and wait a while,

              to stink on a sunny day.

 

A ship, whose name will be lost in time,

              sails into the death,

swirl and twist at the moons order,

              and anchor on a final breath.

 

Anguish and sorrow from castaway lovers,

              at the mess and what could have been,

step over mulch, and condoms, and twigs,

              to once more challenge the sea.

Life Doesn't Go On

Life Doesn’t Go On

 

You’re gone and

life doesn’t go on,

life becomes still

and horrible,

and every time

I see the trophy

that you won

in 2003 for

Most Improved

in Division A

Photography

I’m reminded that

you’re not here and

neither is the year.

My Stay Shun

My Stay Shun

 

I guest it was my stay shun

too sale with the fools

who ride the tide of iddio sea.

 

I tried to ply the game

I couldn’t grasp the rules

now I’m doomed to drown in sanna tea.

While I Sleep

While I Sleep

 

Time does not stop while I sleep,

breaths continue to turn the globe,

Europe dances above my head,

and bombs fall on Gaza while I sleep.

 

The gears keep working while I sleep,

machinery keeps crunching,

clouds form and rain drops and skies clear

and seasons pass while I sleep.

 

Books go unread while I sleep,

poems go unanswered,

thoughts wrestle to no end and

die in a dawn ambush while I sleep.

 

My daughters keep growing while I sleep,

possibilities germinate,

where will they go, what will they do,

how can they leave me in my sleep.

 

Tidal movements, and traffic lights, and moon phases,

and whale songs, and bread baking, and coffee brewing,

and street sweepers, and death, and birth, and learning,

and singing, and chasing, and barking, and shouting,

 

and life,

 

life does not wait for me

              while I sleep.

Men of the Lowest Repute

Men of the Lowest Repute

 

Men of navy, of black and grey,

who bleed their lungs to take the day,

who scream their rules, their roads, their way,

who choose the price that you must pay.

 

Men who should loud with votes,

their promises and souls they quote,

whose lives would be of little note,

who send ‘their’ people on straws to float.

 

They’ve chewed the earth, and spewed concrete,

throw us tiny morsels to eat,

with snide remarks they bid us greet,

and pull the grass from under our feet.

 

My vote to none, I won’t condone

the willful selling of our home,

to the beasts who deny our megaphone,

who carve their effigies with our bone.