“Painful Man” © Thomas Riesner
A Portrait Of Christopher Smart At Play
Fastidiously he wipes his tiddlywinks
of sticky spilled soda
or jocund sizzling burger juice,
not so amenable on the disk
and in the play of this pot-gaping, accumulating game.
One must cleanly “squopp” opponents.
Take your squidger and flip your yellow Eliot;
let it top the romantic red,
the philosophical blue,
and hold and hide the fertile green
that is ever popping up
and cupping score upon score.
No, Smart craves a sallow yellow.
He reads his poetry,
twitters his flute,
holds the charcoal stick just so
eccentrically like a Prufrock
daintily napkins his lips
after tea, cakes, ices,
all the Victorian vices
that disguise their savagery
with effeminate flair,
a game of tiddlywinks
like eighteenth century soldiers
attired in gold braid and handlebar mustache
chins as sharp as hatchets
blithe with coarse opinion,
but strapped, in marching discipline.
Watch the stiff plumes of the heads
hardly move,
no natural toss like on a horse,
no the troops written, drawn, quartered,
are mere toppers like the disks
that mug opponents with such aviating skill.
Smart is quite good with his squidger.
The winks flip up abruptly
and everyone can hear the plastic
of the flat arguments circulate
from ear to ear and one is wowed and whizzed by the skill
of playground war
for it is a game this lame flipping and bopping,
covering the dining room table with little circles,
emoticons with blank feeling
but the truth of Puvis de Chavannes
or the poetry speak of an orator
perforated with the esoterica of a hierophant
or Tarot.
And what is it all about
but a studious swell of the chest.
“I won”,
Smart says to the pussycat,
to the ant crawling on the soda stain,
and another on the crumb, the flake,
the sweet immeasurable goop on the tip of the spoon.
Dan Cuddy lives in Towson, Maryland, a suburb of Baltimore. He is an editor of the Loch Raven Review. He likes to experiment with style and content of his poems.
Thomas Riesner: “I was born in Leipzig,Germany in 1971 and I still live here today. Already in elementary school I often painted “abstract” instead of the given concrete drawing. I later retained this style or changed it to “abstract figuration ” I painted a lot at home, always without professional guidance. I didn’t have any specific role models. When I start a picture, I only have a certain idea, but often something completely different emerges. I would describe myself as an outsiderart artist.”