Poetry. Southern.

THE GAUGUIN MACHINE: RUBBER STAMPED FORGERIES


Sunset red rises
Dawn gold breaks
Morning blue comes

clean in fallow colors
water-tested and fresh
from the South Seas' waves
where dipping and cresting

coast into not just screwing
the cute, brown honey
so sweetly bed and spread
beneath the eye of Gauguin's
Spirit of the Dead watching

but sailing full-masted into
the form-fit escape of a two-bit
freedom and pleasure in the

stretched imagination's snug rubber
stroke of a safe 'Samoa'

painted, as close to the real
thing as you could come
in promises manufactured
to be broken and sold
for the prevention of disease only

Coin returned if machine is empty

-Chuck Sullivan

[1975]