Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Study #7 after Yasumasa Morimura After strapping the tits to my narrow chest and pulling the famous hair over my scalp, I talk to Marilyn about loving Art, playing dumb blonde, being typecast as one thing. She answers, with a toss of her head, her nipples erect as the stalk of a fruit, Grab me. I demur. Out of politeness or fear or disbelief. She takes my hands by the wrists, presses them between her thighs. Now we can talk about anything. *

Poetry-Free-For-All is getting people to write seven poems in seven days, starting on the seventh of the month, i.e. this Friday. It is a week-version of National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWrMo), in which you write a poem a day for 30 days. Seven seems like a good distance to me, to write at full stretch, and it gives three weeks for rest and recovery before the next race. Seven is such a potent figure too, inspiring all kinds of magic and myth.  I plan to write "Seven Studies for a Self-Portrait." Each study will be written after a well-known self-portraitist. That "after" is very open. My seven masters will be Albrecht Durer, Rembrandt van Rijn, Vincent van Gogh, Egon Schiele, Frida Kahlo, Andy Warhol, and Yasumasa Morimura. Rembrandt and van Gogh are obvious suspects; the others came to me as I googled the net. I did not know Morimura's appropriation art till this morning, and he seems to make a good endpoint since he photographs himself in the garb and post...