This is a photo of a painting of a photo of a phonograph,
recording the scratched and pallid palates of a dirt band
doing sleep songs, electric bass dance rites of war.
Deep Purple down and islanded way off East,
long after raisin-bombers have blanketed the corn.
The artist knows the record spins for Baader-Meinhof,
in solitary, in Stammheim Prison. The cell is a wall
of books that blurs, congealing water-oil emoluments
on linen, in company with suicide and sorrow, blistering
a world too small to be blown back inward. The cell
is an image of a butcher lover's strangling hand, forcing
a man to do something beneath his worth. Photo's
of the wife's divorce, beaning in Glamrock nights
at home, while the banker's kneecap flesh is rent
and frozen in a right-wing paper. The paper flaps
along a boulevard in Schöneberg, under lindens in Berlin,
where a painter picks it up and pastes it to his wall,
an image of the state. He snaps shots, a wavering of O's,
of a turntable spinning in a jail cell, an image of a photo
of a phonograph, of the terrorist's brown eyes the day
she's murdered in her cell or kills herself, which terrifies.

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