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 “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 dark, 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,” says 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.