still life...with drinks

It’s girls mostly
Sometimes money
but mostly girls,
I sit on the stool
& stare at the bottles
red wax
clear glass
brown label
we weep until it transcends
it’s meaning
& end up feeling sorry
if not only for ourselves
then for our lovers
who get left to mop up the mess

the happy hours here
paint it all phalto blue
& alizarin red
as we recede into the
still life…a still life with drinks

paint a little patron
sidled against the bar, paint her
hussy, of canary yellow
color her indifferent,
she’s not so cool, she just don’t care
about your experiences on
her sidewalks,
paint her so smooth in her
lopsided equilibrium
paint the words you have spoken
as insignificant props
in a still life
               …with drinks

still, just a life with drinks…

paint yourself on the stool,
hunched over your drink like a tyrant
paint in the distance a jukebox
playing a flying saucer school boy song
that constantly mocks it’s hero
for never getting the girl.
paint bluebird wings
on a dirty word & let it
fly up past the canvas
let everything go from the landscape
except for a glass and a pack of cigarettes
let everything go but the portrait
& recede into the still life,
still life with drinks

draw a moon with dracula teeth
& let it suck your draft beers dry
paint the stick and stillness of wednesday morning
with the pistons in your head
               like fists,
kicking the blood back to life
paint the hangover
           …like the 454
& rev its motors in the still life
idle there awhiles
& don’t flood the canvas with useless emotion
paint a still life with a bartender
paint a still life with a girl
paint it with a little color & a lot of heart
& don’t try to make it seem overly antique,
because love
is not modern in it’s prophylactic wrap,
that shuts out all feeling
& the secret meaning
of a girl.
Paint a little pink halo over your head
& realize that everything
even you
is holy
          still life with drinks…

paint a smile on your subject’s face
just don’t try to make it seem like a pretty thing
paint a stack of problems
but mostly girls
put a tear in the portrait’s eye
or a little blue knife in its back
cover the entire canvas with gunmetal grey
with hints of hooker green
paint an eternal jowl on
his face as if he had just heard a good joke
& leave him there,
forever with that look frozen on his face
receding into the canvas
                    that becomes almost pastoral.
                    In a still life…with drinks

paint it, paint it for real,
a feeling you don’t know a word for,
symbolize it as a crimson heart,
with impeding grey matter in its breadth,
that grey matter
is uncertainty
& it will eat the heart you’ve painted,
eat away at it like a cancer,
& you’ll begin to realize
it’s only acrylic
sometimes secure
but mostly it’s girls,
& as the uncertainty
greedily eats the heart
you’ll begin to understand
that maybe there aren’t any still lives
                    & there aren’t so many girls…
                    there’s just drinks