What’s this? It stared without a face. In place—of eyes it had two viae negativae—of a voice it had a subtle hiss, a cosmic background radiation. What is what? What’s this? O that’s a piece of “The Abyss” in a wrought- silver Renaissance frame from which the original portrait is lost. Feel welcome to look into it for a bit, I’ll be back in a minute. Drunk on liquid capital, skipping, tripping, self-kicking, one foot in a Van Gogh boot, one in a Warhol “Diamond Dust Shoe.” It’s late. I’d like to go home. There was an old woman and man who lived in a pair of matched Van Goghs. You can’t go “home,” said the Jack of Dust. You live here now, drinking the water of broken forms, eating the seeds of dud grenades, wintering in the desert. Listening yes, but from such a remove, like eavesdropping after hiding a wiretap behind a Portrait of an Unidentified Aristocrat, thickly lashed with linseed and mastic and white spirit. Ear to her cold solar plexus, what could you possibly hear?
