How Can I Love You Romaine Brooks?

The stout party was Gertrude Stein

You said and  Picasso was there

Toting his quick avant-garde guitar

You said it

Belied the most normally reliable walk

Home each night

That's the night we met

Romaine Brooks

My sister Janis Joplin was unborn yet

When we met

Romaine Brooks

After Gertrude Stein got her hair off

She was a proper Roman emperor

You said before then

With all that hair-flop back of her head

She was uptight California matron all the way

Wonderful cucumber sandwiches 
In spite of everything

When you walked the streets of Paris

Romaine Brooks I saw you

Wounded by sensuous everythings of the moment

Possessing and caressing

Dressing and compressing now

I swear I saw you

Expressing entire worlds of now

O cripes Romaine Brooks

You took off the top of my head with your art

Do not follow the cow you said

The wife was a love story

Shoved deep in the pocket of her blouse

The full tits and the song

The ways of reading your paintings

Did I tell you Romaine Brooks

That my little sister Janis Joplin was not yet born

When we met?

O sweet Jesus

Cry baby

Welcome home you don't you

Want to cry baby cry cry baby

Welcome you home

Searching for the great sentence

All these years these misplaced decades

Finding only quaint words for everyday life

Right there

O good God though

Good-good-good God though

Settling for the everyday uninspired lover

Right there in Von's Bookshop Lafayette Indiana

Where we last met Romaine Brooks

Where I showed you my scars

Told you my final lies thin fabrications

Janis Joplin would one day buy baby

You never fished though

Except at your table

Where we fished

After you held up something

More than you were prepared to give

That's not when I fell

Fell in love with you

Romaine Brooks

Yes it was and you know

All I got was twenty-five fleas off two tom cats

You left behind

Beyond its tortured anthology the day we met

Left small rabbit turds along the sidewalk

O Janis Joplin my rough sister

Would one day sand that song into soul

Your life belonged to you Romaine Brooks

So we could own our own our own whatnot

Because you asked all the right questions

You suffered that terminal period of writer's block

Just like my sister Janice

Maybe five minutes before you died

O how you loved Ezra Pound and James Joyce

I hated you for that

Because you like Pound were a fascist

And Joyce was a such a turd

Close behind you

I closed behind you

Closed every door behind you

There are many ways of carrying out sabotage

Romaine Brooks I love you

Fascist bitch