Robert Mapplethorpe:
You stole poster art by William Blake.
You felt guilty and weird.
Maybe threatened by laws, known and unknown, by rules not prited or not worth the ink,
you shredded the art and spiraled it down the toilet.
I found this out later, when I read your lover’s book
And feel in love with you like she did – it was a good book.
But when I was innocent, I stole a book my first year of high school.
I stole Robert’s work, a big yellow book of black and white photographs
from the Bowman Library and destroyed it hard on.
Did he make all his pictures look like himself?
A bouquet of cockrings
and braided armpit hair?
Was there shame in beauty?
What did your art transmit to me through confused sex
a cumulous ambition for expression, to be art…whatever fire that is?
Patti: I knew your face
your high contrast naked breasts
your boyish body before I knew you wrote or were an icon.
You turned
me on, but I refuted your threatening power.
I avoid Art – but I am conpulsed,
beat after beat.
