Vasily Kandinsky, Improvisation No. 30 (Cannons), 1913
Oil on canvas
111 x 111.3 cm
Image courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago
very little was coming to me. And then came
your voice stretching me like a Wah-Wah pedal
below Manhattan’s skyline of busy-boy-blue,
after three and four verses of Hey, what’s your name
when the shrill warped speed of thick and exquisite
sounds like Please, don’t make me look and feels
like being stuck on the 84th floor, naked in the elevator
alone with you, the lamenting, hysterical,
butcher’s lost lamb on his way to the wolves.
With the request for restraint denied, I switched
my attention to those dark little huts, flickering
on the heart’s weak side, where legions of lust
emerge at dusk, rising from the grass like Pentecost sparks
schooled in the spirit of scarring. That’s why you
can’t turn and be tamed. Your strength is embroidered
in eyelets of bruise, like dogma broke down on a cobblestone road,
smoking and leaking the best of us all, born from the gang bang
of beauty. I know little when it comes to the vulnerable part,
how often the crack in the cat’s old bowl tries to tell me
the milk on your lips is dripping from the hole in my heart.