assholism

smeared brown, shit dribbles down over Santa's
pom-pom cap and face, turning it into a scatological crown,
and, as if this were some rich empress in drag
out for a lovely night at the opera,
a gloved hand holds up an incongruous pleated fan,
the image embodies a sense of childish excess and morbid yearning,
innocent generosity soiled by aristocratic crap,
obliging its overall wretchedness, it elicits a wide grin,
but the laughter is akin to whistling in the dark

he stood as a wicked edifice, warts and all, at the entrance to the picture-show,
crystallizing the manic tone that made him such an influential force

my friend seems to have been a bit of an asshole,
i'm not making a judgment call, just an observation,
some of my best friends are assholes.
his fabled roc city sojourns in the saloon,
but, given his epic drinking and insatiable
anti-authoritarianism, we probably wouldn't have
found much to argue about anyways

and, my friend’s assholism is no secret - in fact,
is central to his make-up,
as well as being the cause of his
toils receiving as little attention as they warrant

when you do stuff like steeling a dead persons, legless body and then screw legs into it
and display it as a coffee table - feelings are going to get hurt

his iconoclastic persona has gradually acquired a patina of lewdness,
culminating in the spraying of the landscape with
his disdainful urine, devastating it with toxic waste,
but there's more than enough contamination
to chew on in this wide-ranging sampler of assholism

the act is also clearly a reflection on the
place of assholes in the often vicious spectacle of contemporary society,
like in the "Santa Claus" image,
a ghastly miserable thread, within field of brutal play,
full of twists and turns, remarkable coincidences, as in a Dickens novel