Back Bacon

How many times I painted those same slabs of meat
Gay pugilists and wrestlers
Grappling men
Groping men
The rough trade
The ancient catch of boozy trawls
Hampstead pub crawls
The Black Cap and The Richard Steele's
King William the Fourth
Jack Straws

And then outdoors
Seeking the Heath and homophobic
Horsemen of my own apocalypse
Cruising for War
Settling for Famine

And later
Lonely and insatiable
I took my papal rage
Cast across a canvas stage
Anger, hatred, page on page

Meat on criss-crossed meat
Crucified
Intense
Youthful
Free-willed and unselfconscious
Though always photographed

Turning tricks into Triptychs

… I outlived my angry work
Aged
Outlived my lovers and regrets

Lived long enough to
Spin my histories of vagrant impropriety
Funded by the patrons of society -

As art that showed a pure and flagrant piety
Haunted by the demons of occasional sobriety

… My demons are gone
Cirrhotic
And forgotten
Once dangerous - now sad

But paid and paid to revisit their vague gravesites
I touched the faded names of headstones
Weary
Vainly
Trying to remember how to dream

Once
…Once I could paint dead drunk
And now I'm only
...dead