From the guy who could not squeeze out a word. Maybe this is real, 
maybe it's sophomoric drek like *Pink Flamingos* where a minor character 
sings out of his butt. Call it throat-clearing.

KW


Spinal Cord Injury

            When most of [Kahlo's] Mexican colleagues were focused on
            political
            murals, she was looking at tiny votive paintings, folk images of
            catastrophic deaths and miraculous resurrections, and
            modeling her
            work on them. -- Holland Cotter

One of the candidates nailed it,
then stuck the spear in its side:
it may take a village to raise a child
but it takes a family to raze one.

Politics is local.
The national butt-bang of Iraq began
not in the councils of state
but in motel rooms or the mile-high club on a 747.
So, in this season of Lent, my confession,
bless me for I have sinned:
my father was Pol Pot, my mother was Ann Coulter,
I have no consistent politics except my criminal desires,
and the Happy Daze Motor Lodge by Newark Airport
will never smell quite right again.

2

Political reality begins with home schooling,
with lessons taught by the jackbooted parent,
the rabbi with smicha from NYU Dental School
who holds forth from the Torah of
the hundred grand he made last year filing false
Medicaid claims for drilling Mexicans’ teeth,
while he was shacked up in Portland, Maine.

3

Spines break early. The cause is what the cause is.
They do not need a bus to fall on them.
Car wrecks will help but only if you’re a Mexican painter
destined for a life of screaming pain, narcissism,
and becoming an icon for how awful men are.

Kahlo invites opprobrium for her self-absorption.
If she’d been a poet, she would have fit right in.
The world is my mirror reflecting me
So I paint exactly what I see.

She paints herself next to a Marxo-Falstaffian Rivera,
more immense and amorphous than The Blob,
a Greyhound bus with a peripatetic penis--
and she is miniscule beside him, but
the Frida-image could devour him whole,
a chihuahua ingesting a mastiff.
She knows the effect women have upon men.
For who but the divine sex goddess Ann Coulter
could have seduced the devout revolutionary Pol Pot
and produced me?

4

Wounding.
You cannot recover from the insult of
God taking your face in his hands
as though to offer a kiss,
but then ripping it in his furious palms,
plunging down into your back,
tearing out the cord, lifting the vertebrae
so not one is left intact.

Surgeries fail and darkness claims you,
but you do not fear
for darkness has always been yours,
a familiar spirit since the day
the bus rolled over before your memory began,
before the curse of demonic love diverted your life
from a river into a storm drain, left you nothing
but memories you will never have
of what cannot be forgiven,
of what crushed you yet made you stand

its rod and its staff they beat your sorry ass,
you cursed God but could not die
instead were gifted to live and create
from your one unbroken mirror.

You didn’t invent it, Frida. You died
the same year as my father. You’d
have liked him. He wasn’t Trotsky,
just a satyr.
Like I said, all politics sooner or later is local.

4

Narcissism is First Nature, not second.
There is no second nature, only hesitant fuck-ups.

It is not autoeroticism to gaze longingly into a pool.
The illusion is that it is a pool at all instead of
a tannery ditch where you search but fail to find
your own face except in the ghost of the steer
sacrificed for the feet you did not have until you met a man
who had no Bruno Magli shoes,

until a jester God gives you blinding sight
for one second before retracting it for good,
laughing his ass off.

What is sight but the gift that keeps on taking?
You, Frida, in a surgical brace, pierced by nails,
St. Stephen or Washizu crucified with arrows--
you know there is an answer, you have received it,
but no one has told you the questions
and none of us will ever know them because
the pain is too great to ask Why
there was the rollover bus, the madman
who really was not Pol Pot anymore than anyone
would want to screw Ann Coulter unless
he was her parish priest,
the answers to pain and to childhood, to why
even suffering sometimes produces shitty art
self-referential paint and word splatterings, and politics
that like its proponents is a vicious bore--nobody can say.

5 (Afterword)

This is the present. Why would you look
for anything to come AFTER?

KTW/3-14-08

-- 
------------------
Kenneth Wolman			http://bestiaire.typepad.com
    Abuse of power comes as no surprise--Jenny Holzer