Rescuing A Painting

Rescuing A Painting

from the trash is
the equivalent of a poem
pasted hopeful to a ticking warhead
or lily handed to the advancing
serially murderous
but
it's still not at all a bad image,
that blonde canvas woman with startling
blue eyes of a different size looking
to the left, her shadowed face planes
drooping a bit with some emotional mumps
scar-apparent against the peeling pipes
of that turquoise cellar or bathroom tiles
she finds herself a hostage in, &;,
on the back, the label reads,
"Jay Tripped", or is it, "John",
so who really was the victim in this work,
anonymous, that the owner gave to the curb
as if the whole question was just too much
to go on living with