On First Peering up at Damien Hirst’s Virgin Mother

now you know we came

from old watery graves

swam dark mirrored seas

beneath these long blasphemous legs

the story of all founders

old ancient orders, lost and found, thirty minutes or free

frozen frames the brown box of dreams

the pathetic, meek, nuptials destroyed

the will of your only slightly bent knee

a causation for chaos

an ars usurp stars vice verso great grey lady:

turn our page,

stay spirited

stay crux, dumb while the spaceless orbit of your vulva

ruptures sunless-set horizons, bad tips, a grain of sand

draining every strained foot, it figures the law of the hourglass

the hurls of nonchalance, the pooling mass of poverty, the

poisons, the vivid intransigence,

the made-weary sins come commonplace craning like the long

necks of roses rising from murky American rivers;

you rise out of these urban rivers, escape

float like virgins of a Venetian festa on Ascension Day

above the magnificence of meanness.

i long to climb your long legs

into your story

i hear, stand, and star-crossed startled

fall back into the nothing’s heroic anymore

feel the vainglory

with precipitous mystery you,

casting away from fear

sail into the isles of Santa Croce, return

trailing perdition here onto Park Avenue;

your flagged dress moist green

squab white

dry airy yellow

men pissing anxiety, unkissable feet.

you are the one thing in New York not on a t-shirt,

uncopied, unstripped in the showers of business towers

uncopped by the spiked hands of equivalence, reigning

for here copyright is outside the still point of art

sailing around you, circling into your stillness

the museums that weather-bureau the past

– to these machines made of hurricane financing

i am Croesus, falling

in the count

one hundred dollars a minute an hour paying for

a kiss of fire a colossal tax on all not made of soul.

i follow the orbit of your visionary vortex

past planets where time is measured

in geospatial distance, where October is still

a thousand kilometres away.

what changed angel to devil

was the choice to keep talking despite all failures

we thought we loved

art, but art is a sterile trumpet, a strumpet,

a division, a discernment

offered to all drunk chimeric Kings;

serve us, serve under, savant:

state rue to us

we grew into its waning rules

fell into this falling

a chorus of eyes fall silent: all us.

Lady, your spontaneous goddess cleaving

your fee-fi-fo-dium gulps

down sinners and sports fans

as we retreat into the Bronze age

of the concept, youthful towers

lean on the blanched sheen of legend

while war and bloodless beliefs swamp us with age.

there are too many heroes in this overabundant store

too many blue eyes, hunting in their own oceans, for pearls,

another birth of spring

we can do without the belief in history

fat habits are the clothings of cold dreams

unfortunate is a mild word worse than decadence

we have to answer a world of questions

transfigured to poetry

like invaders landing from beneath the sea

La Bella Marina.

you rise, stride into this masterly brilliance

like a sculpture of our haunted silence.

Still I stand, forced to shift curious

at the digital photograph makers

who twitter titter circle your vagina.

I am in the shadow of your great rock.

I am convinced of the wilderness of your pictures

that spread out and transgress the grid of these streets.

Super-statue looms above me.

Unpretentious and freaky, as one written in dark, star-laced waters.