Eight: King (poem)
King
Artsy is the acquired name
The King of this domain not cute, believe it
And swords don’t pull from stones, but a crazy with a knife
was witnessed once
Things happen on the beat and things get made
only for use but color
color is a natural it’s a world
ready-mosaiced in cheerful throwaways
when we end we’ll float awash
on plastic—no hate—is a great material, bendy, easy to cut
and free, unwelcome, easy to get
and if you know the nitty grit
you don’t worry about the future, well ahead of it
I have to get your permission to publish your picture
Someone said
Like, royalties?
No, for a story.
And they can’t get jokes, so the hand is digging for change
There, the King would tell his real subjects
Is your best sign. People don’t carry dollars, they don’t need em
One day, when one of these foreign emissaries wants to help
It’ll have to be, buy my product
I have a product
Besides a personal sense of style they want to steal
They want to film an apocalypse with an unpaid cast
And I don’t mind I have a home to go to
They think I’m wrong in the head, too dumb
A sock, squashed in the gutter, one thing I got today
It sat on a foot, now it sits on mine
You see, I draw it in, I own a little piece of everything
That’s what I am, a vessel to the universal flow
I’ve got lives in my empire, a phone that holds its data
A sacred text for the coming prophet
A lady’s bag, lifted, not slashed Empty
but a Life Saver… Wash it. A linty Post-it
And here is how I reconstruct the crime
King
The Tunnel
Queen
(2021, Stephanie Foster)