Here we are with the gypsy girl
an inspired study I will say
simplicity should flourish best
in some paradise of painters
Inside this landscape, foxes
are our sympathies not with them?
they forage underneath the messy sky
not abased by the wound of loveliness
Guys & girls & bishops
all you vagrant utopians veering
heroic as fucking gasoline
without single-mindedness or status
No pressure; exclude pursuit; open
oh, open now!
bold & childlike inconsistencies
just life inside this void
Together maybe we demonstrate the imprecise
our appearances not adequate yet nonetheless
somehow to shine, a fire of faggots
presented in a sorry field
spat upon in destitution’s calling
lexis additional to sequence from 100 Famous Paintings Part 2 (Cassell, 1923), p 6 (text on “The Vagrants, by Frederick Walker”), & from Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians: in the Mediterranean world from the second century AD to the conversion of Constantine (Penguin, 1988), p 366