Balladry in the Gallery

Visited the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center
a few days ago to catch "Late Night."

Where every Thursday the hall stays open until 10pm
with up-tempo contemporary underground techno tuneage,
extemporaneous versification and other hidden pleasures.

It had been my first chance to poetize in the presence of Pollack, Picasso,
and other greats and was, I must say,
a truly rewarding experience.

My friend and fellow wordsmithian Lord Nodrog, my darling Nee Nee in sumptuous black skirts and I arrived at about 7:40 to a bassy throb of electronica swirling blue phantoms
down and out the glass hallways.

The lights were low and brown and a flat balmy breeze was purring from the paintings
and through us all with unwavering intensity.

Ley-line dividing cloudbursts of stimulating visionary vivacity shifting on-off-on-off with the drive of obsessive compulsive light switches and the kind of fecund exuberancy almost reserved to the imaginative bohemian brand of modern American bourgeois,
the few and far between,
the last poster-children of a craft and mastery outsourced to charlatanic posturers
and mountebank smiley glad-hand-goody-two-shoes
with their make-believe book deals and lime green Mac-books.

The main hall was overcome by a slew of fragrances, some designer masking the delicate
sex chemicals of well-to-do art majors, hazy coquettes thumbing their belts, upturning wrists and gossiping in mousy squeaks.

The pleasant perfume of bastardized pheromones was soon extinguished by the pungent redolence of Costa Rican coffee, Japanese eggplant salsa, olive baguettes, fried wantons and room temperature Bleu d'Auvergne.

The music grew louder but did not escalate above the fridge-buzz of young confabulation.

The off-the-cuff reading began at around eight adjacent to Francis Bacon's Study for Portrait IV and an ominous factory landscape of smoke columns and shore lines by Georgia Okeefe.

We read without a podium or chairs or other superficial distractions...just verse clothed in the fine salt and sinew of the artisans sensory interpretation of the world.

The pink, intent, tender and jovial crowd packt like sardines
between the white wooden frame of the entryway.

And just as soon as it had begun, it was over...
Like a breath in the Martian dispensary, a candle flame in the ashen wind of a winters eve;
peculiarly animated and swelling with life’s blood but only for a distinctive, designated moment.

But that moment was something to remember,
a titilating occurance I would recommend to any bundle of nerves with even the slightest interest in escaping the mundane commonality of our work-eat-sleep-dream routine.

Where we can all...if only for a millisecond cease pretending that we are characters in a play and observe what is real, what is relevant, and what is infinite.

I do believe I will return!

And I think...I've become like one of the others!

There was a frail syrup dripping off His lap danced lapel, punctuated by her decrepit prowl she washed down the hatching gizzard soft as a mane of needles...