just wait outside
one century, please
while i take off
my french impression
of a personality
and wipe off the
cynical poet's heartbeats
from my dress

the failed artist
turned abstract dentist
will be in soon
to remove your front teeth
with his gift-shop eraser
and to brush away your cavities
with his hands-free paintbrush

and don't forget
you have an interview
at two o'clock a.m
with the literary magazine
obituary reporters
who want to know why
the woman with a parasol
jumped off the brooklyn bridge
and what monet had to say
when she did

i was there when it happened:
one of the security guards
tried to transform the white space
underneath her dress
to real life emptiness
by holding a pair of lungs
his five-year-old son
had drawn for him
up to her mouth

no matter how many
times she connected the dots
into his chest no matter
how many times
she stenciled screaming
speech bubbles into his head
with her fingernails
and yelled to the tourists
that the oxygen was causing
her artistic temperature
to plummet down

no one did anything

except critique her breath patterns
as exquisite examples
of the early days of
eighteenth-century finger paint

soon his flesh blended
with her oil paint
his mother's eyes
her colorless fatherless pupils
conducted electricity
and for a while there
i wondered
whose body was the
metropolitan art museum
and who was going to be
the subjective realism
in this masterpiece

and when he let go
so did she

for weeks i heard him
talk about how close
he came to death
in the employee lunch room
and the dancers at the bar
the “Sunset at Ivry” the bathers
and i whispered quietly about
how close our friend
had come
to life