Otto Dix

After the war each night was the same;
Shocked awake, shaking, in a cold sweat.
His smile was barbed wire, his speech bullet-holes,
Everywhere he looked, he saw grotesques.
“Attack” was his watchword, his salvation;
Battlefield priest in soldier’s hairshirt, he confronted
The ludicrous world, ramshackle ghost train,
Nursery of the stupid bourgeois, strutting his mediocrity.

Skinny dandy in sharp suits, with slick blond hair,
Arrogantly cruising bars, charming seducer,
Dancing passionate tangos with hungry women,
He made the circus and the brothel his own,
Phantom of the fairground, pointing an accusing finger,
Harsh laughter turning the forbidden inside out.

He relished the gargoyles’ solemn self-regard,
The devils who thought they were angels,
The dead who thought they were alive.
Always the outcasts were his special love,
Horror and comedy his twin companions,
His painter’s smock a surgeon’s gown
As he probed the bloody mess with forensic compassion.

Surfaces were beautiful for what they concealed;
That monstrous energy beyond human judgment,
Endlessly creating and destroying with abandon.
His fierce eye exulted in each sensual detail,
Crying “Yes” in the face of death and destruction,
Drawn to the beast beneath the civilized veneer.

He had to see with his own eyes, to verify
The ugliness and extremity, the orgasm of war,
Foraging and fighting on the mind’s front line,
Funambulist treading fine above the abyss,
Between contradictions, turning fear into grace,
Kasper Hauser in the city, a black shining crow.