(For some reason I can’t get this to copy my  actual format of the poem correctly, however, here it is!)

Jean Genet Son of a Bitch
(A one man show at the Outhouse Dublin)

For Zion Ashkenazi

“…we hopefully elevate ourselves – without giving in to smugness – above the self-limiting level of voyeurs, including those clandestine collectors who saw no more in the film than the guard did in the cells.” (Jim’s Reviews on “Chant d’ Amour)

Zion Ashkenazi

So easily, you could be
the unnamed prisoner
in Genet’s “Chant d’ Amour”.
Foreign and hirsute in just the sleeveless vest,
your clenched fist beating the wall.
And I the guard,
“cravenly peering into another’s cell.”
The spyhole in-between us.

I wait expectant
(Like Querelle’s grasping Norbert’s dice)
in this back-room,
switching off our phones,
until your nearly-naked form before us

Is in some rancid prison space.
You dance move and sing
put on
(with just imaginary shoes)
some white-unbuttoned pants
and make his idiom fit the several
jackets that you wear.

I know this Genet is
…poetic space,
in which you find
precarious equilibrium.
The hole I see you through
enlarges now,

our murdered flesh
not disembodied in a book
but held in this:

the play’s
too short embrace.