In another life, I was paintedOut of the picture, By the Table,Scummed up with oil layered likePremature common lilac leavesPeering down. I am sat next to the politician,Away from The Poets™, all trademarked,Separate, wearing smoky black velvetSomeone’s wife stayed up to purify,To make ready to warm their preciousSkins, the saints of secular sin,Reading a book of their own poems.
I am dedicated to Baudelaire, my lifeMetamorphosized as Ovid would’ve wanted.Here I am made useful. I am simplified,I only do what I have always done: I gulpStale oxygen and make no noise. I sit pretty,Listen to the men debate the universe andTell me about myself. I wait and wait andWait for greatness. My leaves curl and brown,The men grow tired of waiting for the paintTo mix, of waiting to be set on canvas, to beSet and known and artistic. They are shaking,Standing there, forced into stillness, they sweatWith the effort of containing themselves, ofTrying to look like they know someone willWorship them in a hundred years. Blémont’s handShakes in his coat, trying to be Napoleon (theFirst), but like the Third no one remembers him.38 years later he would give the painting away,Give me away. I am rotting in the Musée, wastedSpace, a canvas that could have gone for someHigher purpose than this filth, this solipsism of poets,Thinking that they are the world because they nameIt. I am a parallel growth just there for symmetry, toBalance everyone else’s colors. Guilty by association,By proximity to the doomed, the damned, by my ownRot-core that will not reassure the man next to meWith a pretty face, a smile, a nod.
Rimbaud has the most hair, the most talent,The men sit around him, not looking at him asThey would scorn a child. He is bored. He has alreadyKilled God; there is not much else to do. I wonder ifHe has already been to Belgium, ass-fucked the baldingMan next to him, been shot in the wrist of the writingHand, made simple, useless, begged again, metThe raised six-shooter in the street. His loverCowarded to Catholicism, and Rimbaud slippedFrom French to Arabic, sold guns illegallyOn the slave routes of Africa, guns that wouldShoot other wrists and make the poetry stop.We stop in this painting, flat, almost colorless,Un-restored, left to flaking, to the merciless breathOf people who pass by anyways, looking for someoneGreater, recognizable. Perhaps they know Rimbaud,But they won’t be able to see me, off-green,Wilted. After all these years the wine on the tableLeaves sludge, the butter has soured, theEyes hardened into shallow ice. The flowersThat are me have waited too long, over-drunkOn dirty water. Tomorrow they will dumpThe vase out and throw me in the fire.The Poets will stand up, brush my leaves off,Write another poem, another horizontalPlea for remembrance. And me, I will burnUp, up, up, the painting will be covered withCloth, stored in a back room, and no oneWill know that I grew before I was cut.
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