Yes, It Is True, Collage Is Messy Like Love

Gris’s collages have their merits

Especially when the ice machine is broken

This is not the collage I expected

I was thinking more along the lines

Of muffled voices behind a door

And somebody’s kid kicking the pop machine

A simpleton in love with bubble wrap and Juan Gris

Who loved collage and paint and wine

Yes, it is true, collage is messy like love

My eyes can hear the paint sing

The song of the paint is a red song

Black is the color of oblivion

Infinity is transparent

Like lacquer on a chest of jewels

And so I wear skin and hair

But who needs clothing in Death Valley?

Here comes Clint Eastwood riding a white stallion

I need more wine, more words, more ink

He mumbles to no one in particular

And swaggers like Jim Morrison

Getting drunk with Michael McClure

You know, peyote knows a lot about the desert

It takes you so far into the night

That the morning star is wrapped in cotton

And the heat of the sun penetrates the skin

Ghosts of the desert dance in the eyes of a lizard

And everywhere there is the strange logic of gold

Cooked in the skulls of the miners

Each skull is a dome of bone

Because it inflates the mind

And wheezes like a sick lung

An iron poem groaning with an iron emotion

The shine of death the hardness of death

Are the very origins of poetry

Whistling and wheezing with molten lava

And a dream of mattress springs

In the soft Louisiana breeze