Scoundrel Time

Two Poems by Elena Karina Byrne

IT’S TIME DAMIEN HIRST DIED IN THE PILL BOX,

 

in the hurt love of God, in the shark tank-same place you

put yourself in danger, in secret, in the butterfly wing’s solace

ripped from blue flight, motor-driven, paint-splattered loophole

dial to the child you were. It’s a shit-hour sense of consciousness

seal broken, monstrous world access-easy located on the dot.

See it? Crossing the crosswalk, doing the Leonardo thing, that

theater life-drawing from which you take a stuffed animal in

the dark act out into the open again. A piano must fall on you.

What else is there to death & art-hymn of the body you hate?

A new arrangement of diamonds in the skinned skull sees fit to

call, as glittering is seeming & seething… Words teeming

between your teeth where you can’t breathe, where you’ll live

medicine-forever in the darkened blue bygones of extinction

like this: suspended, your relic head upright as your reputation.

 

_____

 

MIKE KELLEY, KELLEY CHEAT SHEET

scared the carbon hell out of cracked colors, clouded & crowded.
Mike drove those stuffed animals out of their bored silence off
the wall into my terror-hairless skull. He said, he said. Into social
media box frame, all USA Mike hurt the forest of small shiny things
like sweet fizzed chaos of thinking for me. Kelley, pallor-drug-boy-
toy, underground dummy culture breathing a clustering crack-cartoon-
swoon-song centered, really a knock on someone’s haven halo, he was.
For bedstead master, Nazi cock flag flown, for sleepless crosswalk brief
encounters, he, he, sticky. I looked & looked for the world of my own
feeling faces, born away from fear: Not a bad one-eyed child of our country
cozying up to uncontrolled complex candylands you carry around, junkyard
empire politics choking you with a dull home spoon so you can pretend he
sees his own headshot backfiring its last unstitched expression, your blameless
Mom & Dad in the big Mike Kelley room watching you watch too.

 

 

 

 

Image By: https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/story-damien-hirst-shark/