duchampion shyku 1

"his attitude of amiable and
idle onlooker, puffing slowly
at a pipe in an apparently
empty studio, could not
have been more misleading
if taken for inertia rather
than serenity" said
Anne D'Harnoncourt

h.p. roche shyku

was an intimate New York friend
of Marcel's who according to
the novel he wrote in the fifties
I think which was later plucked
from the illiterate continuum
by Truffaut and made filmic
then remade only a few years
ago by Bertulluci (misspelled
of course) a movie you left me
to watch actually during my
last all-out trip to New York
so you could snuggle with Amy
and Hunter not yet snoring
nearby called 'The Dreamers'
about a young trio who tryst
their way into a menage and
echoing all the way back to
Manhattan in the teens and
maybe early twenties when
two French transplants with
Roche being by far the more
prolific in his carnal bagging
tussled a wealth of Amer
ican women in the vicinity
Marcel even once coming home
(an accident, I swear, this,
coming) to a charged herd
of nymphs in repose on his
bony squalid little cot that
nearly everyone was appalled
by when they visited his
studio which was not often
since there was very little
to appear there and in-
frequently as recognizable art
a snowshovel hung renamed
In Advance of A Broken Arm
or a footstool bearing a
wink and kinetic horn whirring
such the unicorn of aesthetics
emerging of course improbably
from itself from force of
belief in what can violate
laws of nature by being
imagined, much like any
story of conquest involving a
skinny but by most accounts
lizard-like lothario with 'smiling
eyes' an ex-lover called them
warbling over an always in-
expressive fall-out of the
face below in what could
only be stoic outgrowth
of everything quietly discounted
beyond control or concern
nothing of which has anything
to do with friendship or Roche
or an expansive or even
visionary use of one's time
but to that since that is
the topic at hand I should speak
of how time clung to him
and elongated itself
an effect due to his solitude's
ability to navigate its own
dimensions without growing
weak that is without being
converted into loneliness
as it is with most people
looking out of the other side
of the Large Glass

shyku in conflict

A bunch of well-tucked bastards,
'Come on, sissy dick', nothing obliterates
purpose like a surfeit of options.

blood sausage shyku

buy your sausages from a local
farmer if you can
and your wine from a local winery
and make sure it's strong
at least a Cabernet:
put down some oil
in a heavy-bottomed pot
then add some thick-cut onions
and garlic and when it's sizzling
add the sausages, brown the bottoms,
flip them, add about a quarter bottle of the wine
and let the whole thing cook until
the wine's about burned off
and meanwhile steam some spinach or something
and then throw it all on a plate
and put on an old Rolling
Stones record and
clunk your elbows down
on the knotty wood
table and don't worry about wiping
your face, don't worry about
taxes or time or
any other trouble that finds
men, just chew the good
sausage until you are
barely there like
the silent character
in an old film
or a Hemingway story
or, better yet,
one of the characters
the director or author
erases at the last minute
promising "someday
I'll write a story
just for you"

going away for a while shyku

off to Millerton tomorrow
to figure things out
alone and
something's waiting
shykus, shybans,
beckett, sunset, bugs
the image of
not my son

empathy against shyku sculptures

sometimes the shyku
is just there
to hang the title on

hawkeye shyku

apologies accept the space
they have rented behind the face
they are paid to