Bricks and paint and trees

There’s an Austrian painter I dig,
an architectural visionary, like crazy, man,
very outré, you know what I mean?

-I mean he doesn’t have a degree

or license, but some of his designs

have actually been built-

I won’t mention his name,

you can find it easily enough.

I found his paintings in the late sixties

in The Realist, the socio-political-

religious criticism and satire magazine.

His paintings look a lot like

the ones I’ve seen in books that feature

the art of institutionalized psychotics.

Dig it, they like vibrate,

you know what I mean?

And his buildings are much like that,

no hard corners, curvilinear, spirals,

a giant brick snake with trees

on its back. Far out, man!

They’re psychedelic!, but

I don’t think he took drugs.

It just looked he dropped

a few tabs of orange sunshine

or ate a lot of magic mushrooms.

A symphony of anarchy that

somehow hangs together

like a chaotic English garden

in full midsummer bloom.

Or an explosion in a paint factory.

He died twenty some odd years ago

and is buried under a tulip tree

in the Garden of the Happy Deads.