A Poem About the Duke of Vandals
By Chuck Palahniuk
“Nobody calls Michelangelo the Vatican’s bitch,” says the
Duke of Vandals,
just because he begged Pope Julius
for work.
The Duke onstage, his scruffy jaw, scrub brush with pale
stubble,
it
goes round and round, kneading and grinding
a
wad of nicotine gum.
His gray sweatshirt and canvas pants are flecked with dried
raisins
of red, dark-red,
yellow,
blue and green, brown, black and white paint.
His hair tumbles behind him, a tangle of brass wire,
tarnished
dark with oil
and
dusted with sticky flakes of dandruff.
Onstage, instead of a spotlight, a movie fragment:
a
slide show of portraits and allegories, still lifes and
landscapes.
All of this ancient art, it uses his face, his chest, his
stocking
feet in sandals
as
a gallery wall.
The Duke of Vandals, he says, “No one calls Mozart a
corporate whore”
because he worked for the
Archbishop of Salzburg.
After that, then wrote The Magic Flute,
wrote Eine kleine Nachtmusik,
paid by
trickle-down cash from Giuseppe Bridi and his
big-money silk industry.
Nor do we call Leonardo da Vinci a sellout,
a
tool,
because
he slopped paint for gold from Pope Leo X and
Lorenzo
de’ Medici
“No,” say the Duke, “We look at The Last Supper and the
Mona
Lisa
And never know who paid the bills
to create them.”
What matters, he says, is what the artist leaves behind, the
artwork.
Not
how you paid the rent.
