Monday, December 5, 2011

Adam’s Rib, Doused in Turpentine (by Willem de Kooning)


     First you take some wobbling globs of flesh, knead them and pound them, pummel them like dough then press them together into slabs of gooey putty. Then you stretch them, fold them over, twist them with both fists, place in each of their outspread palms a sizzling firecracker. Poke a few puncture wound eyes and slash an afterthought mouth and that, my son, is how you make a woman. 

      Next you impregnate her, flood her orifice with your oozing phlegm, slather her buried eggs with creamy smegma. As the months crawl by, watch her body swell larger and larger until it appears she will burst, but before she does her legs will fly apart and her pelvis will convulse and she will shoot fetus after splattering fetus from her vaginal barrel, until her progeny, all female, stand before her, boneless and dripping, a coven of exploded crones performing rubbery rumbas from canvas to canvas, leaving behind them runny puddles of linseed oil. 

     And then what? What can you possibly do next, standing in the middle of this room, surrounded by all your writhing, wriggling daughters, with their flopping boobs and sloppy twats flapping in all directions, sacks of organs turned inside out, spilling viscous fluids all over the gallery floors?  What do you do when they ask if youd like to dance?

         I suggest you fucking dance.

3 comments:

  1. you are twisted in the most delightful ways -excellent piece of writing
    like some sort of a zen trauma film - very good i say ole chap - EB

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  2. This is fucking great! No wonder the poor sucker drank himself into oblivion. (really like your new masthead too) I highly recommend the Stevens/Swan biography of de Kooning - best biography, by far, I have ever read.

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  3. Thanks, Mark! I'm hoping to borrow that bio from a painter friend as soon as he finishes it, it sounds riveting. I just saw the MOMA retrospective, which prompted the poem.

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