jeff koons thought he was taking a photograph of a slice of cake—maybe a birthday cake, probably a cake bought from the store to give to someone you don’t like (because it’s from the store, which is easy, sort of, unless it’s saturday afternoon) or maybe to give to someone you do like but you don’t have the time to make a cake or maybe you just don’t have the money, which really doesn’t make sense because making a cake by yourself mostly costs less money than buying one at the store, unless it’s not really cake but something that just looks like it. a lot of poor people buy cake at the store, i notice.
like marie antoinette, now that i think about it, except she wasn’t talking about herself and neither are the poor people… i don’t buy cake at the store, but i don’t really even eat cake.
but jeff koons- he wasn’t taking a picture of cake. he accidentally took a photograph of the day my little sister was born: tacky and sterile, with frosted roses pasted to the edges, and me crying in the corner because she had no teeth.
jeff koons, jeff koons, and a baby stuffed into a bear with arms longer than its legs, not eaten, mind, but stuffed.
she looks like she(he,it?) bought some cement shoes, but for her chest
sort of like a chocolate raisin, the ceramic kind, like
I am heavy with a shipment of baubles from the underground warehouse
that sells cement shoes—
for your chest.
or, rather, for your enemy’s chest,
only i bought this pair for myself. there was a sale.
I always wanted to be a chocolate raisin,
the iron version,
a ship’s hull crusted in metal urchins.
if I hit you in the eyes, hard
you would see out of sea-star-shaped slits.
if i could lift my hand, or breathe.
we exchange information,
trade facts in the brown paper bags some puts in their backpack
to carry cocaine or a salami sandwich.
you can’t fight mist with a sword and someone cracked my telescope when they used it as a cane. i don’t blame them, we all need something to lean on, but i just hope that if I keep moving my feet, i’ll reach something that’s not nothing or a cliff.
falling, trapped in a bear and amore and my arms still only gape.
