Vienna, 1913: Discalced Trinity
Painter:
He saw me there.
Fuck! Fuck!
He saw me
In my stupid stupid trapper hat.
He laughed at me,
Because I was on the bike
In my work clothes,
Debased,
Layered and fat and soles falling
Out everywhere——
It’s not my fault it’s fucking cold!
He,
Off to some function or soirée
Surely
(He once laughed at my Belvedere!)
Without a care.
You oughta
Tell them
To let me back into the school.
Analyst:
I saw him there.
Hah! Hah!
I saw him
In his self-imposed degraded state,
And he the one told me to wait
For his tardy and limping pretense nonsense!
I was too busy, in my office
Listening and writing over the head
Of a man who was mute unless while in bed,
And he tinkered in that which I like to dabble
(And he wasn’t half bad in naught but a towel).
Still, I found nothing to compel him to speak,
And my failure in turn made me old and quite weak.
More weak, though, the other’s figure rent me:
So lithe and framed: all that was not sent me.
Enough! let him writhe in his squalor:
He tried to blame what he did on his Father.
We must be quick! Autumn is on the wing,
And I’ll be damned if he should bloom again come spring!
Vagrant:
I am still there, around the river bend
Or scaled the mountain, high upon the crest.
The cattle said my offer to rescind:
That neither of them earned to be my guest.
We’ll trick the painter, let us dress in black
And, with the newsman, haunt him in his dreams,
And you, my doctor dear, will also lack,
For I shall leave you for the glitt’ring streams.
I am there, telling secrets in the lot,
Awaiting starlight: savior of half-truths——
I’m bitter. All my secrets they forgot.
I laid them in the crypt, inside their tomb.
And in my goss’mer blouse to see the Duke,
I stop halfway——beside the creek to puke.