Warhol Revisited

It doesn’t matter what the critics think, keep making more art. ~ Andy Warhol

The bon vivant
making naked remembrance
of a background shooting,
film and history intermixed
with oceans of grief
in an eerie replay of his childhood.

“The scars look pretty in a funny way.”

But wow, the narrative rises to meet
horror and reality in a crazy mixed media scheme
involving blood and fantasies, dream and tissue,
as if God had given a second chance.

But what does it all mean, this porous existence
expressed in a tired vision of decay?
And so it was, we reeled with the aftershocks
of the Sixties.

Up to his sleeves in sleaze.

Amid the portraits and lavish commissions
he buried himself in fortunes
and an expanding influence pressing outward
in all directions.

Indifferent portraits of Mao, Jackie, Marilyn,

the ubiquitous soup cans,
diffused with phenomenal intensity.
Portraits in a wired weird washout of wicked wildness,
inundated with ample iconography to create a sense
of mad genius pervading all.

A Charles Dickens of the pop art scene,
immersed, devoured, ever pouring out the work,
ever provocative, forever progressing, energetic,
splashing the world with tacky wonder.