ARTIST.LIVED HERE. (For Mark Gertler)

The Hampstead Plaque Fund
and the local real estate company
have conspired together, wagered
big money to keep you here –
here in this discarded
cigarette butt of a corner,
scuff-marked and ashen with burnt-out light.

They have inscribed your name
in bold white block letters on a mounted black
oval. They have stuffed your years between
unseen parentheses like stage directions.
(Enter stage left 1891) -
(Exit stage right 1939).
Your life little more than the hyphenated
suspension between birth and death.

You are fixed in this space
for good now, whether you like it
or not – a stuffed bird,
dead and caught forever in flight,
invisible cord hung high behind glass
in an old, brick museum.

If I were you, I would
stumble out of the grave screaming,
dirt-mangled grass in my hair,
“I did more than ‘LIVE HERE’ once.
I shat here, and spat tobacco,
and downed shots of whiskey. I pissed here
and painted in bright, contrasting colors.

I piled the horrors of war onto a merry-go-round
and spun them about until their screams
were suspended in orangeblue. I threw
bricks at museum windows and demanded
they let me in. And now you
have all but forgotten

me. My paintings archived
in dusty manila envelopes you call
the Internet, and one or two hanging
naked in the Tate. While you
have turned me into this plaque,
these rusting brown bricks,
a window boarded up
with yesterday's newspapers.”