Photograph

 Diane Arbus, 1923-1971

I loved the photos by Diane Arbus

All those broken people

Pinned within her lens

Like faded butterflies

And two-headed moths

On a microscopic slide.

The Giants bent and crippled,

The Little People smug and stretched.

Faces creased with age or insanity,

Sometimes tainted by lost humility

Or shamed by shattered humanity.

Naked transvestites

Tucked in mock femininity.

Flagrant female forms

With popping breasts

And pouting lips

And deadness in their stare.

Captured joy in the limited.

Cruelty in the fool.

And distance in the desperate hugs

Of dispirited couples.

Crippled witches in wheelchairs,

Hollow haunts of Halloween and

The somehow sexless exposed bodies

Of nudists unnaturally natural.

And then the last image

The last and lasting one

Of a shaky hand popping pills

And then the slash and glistening

Blood on blade and wrist.

And the blackened shutter.