One themed poem by David McLean

Musée des Beaux Arts
by David McLean

they were never wrong about pain's location,
i grant you that,
the Old Masters who saw suffering swimming
in the dark ocean of unintentional indifference,
on its obliviously paddled course, splashing
obedient to the twitch of involuntary innocence
in kittens, perhaps, or puppies
watching the incomprehensible crucifixion
on God's cruelest hill,
the comprehensive evil only sometimes apprehended,
as we eat, or walk, or hang out of the windows we opened
and drive our doggy destiny
onwards,
so doggedly
and in your Breughel's Icarus no one notices
or, noticing, ignores, the boy's sad boring story
as he enters death's inverted ballet
when sojourners at sea enjoy his summer's day;
but, just as surely as in his insouciance
Icarus drowns in Everyman’s absurdity,
the meaningless ugliness of that pair of feet
misplaced on the boring canvas before us,
and some savage god behind
the son's, the sun's, so obvious decision -
a sea cut to shattered tatters
by that suicidally abrupt incision
the epitome of a free action,
a clumsy accident

Author bio:

David McLean has poems in or accepted by just over 200 publications in print and online. A chapbook, 'a hunger for mourning' is available at Erbacce Press, another, electronic, chapbook, 'poems against enlightenment,' is available for free download at Why vandalism?, and a full-length book called 'Cadaver's dance' will be out at Whistling Shade Press in 2008, around April/May. He is currently writing a novel about a really cool lesbian on smack.