Josef Kinzel, Austrian
For Don, the Best Thing About Growing Potatoes Was That Whenever He Got Bored, He Could Practice His Golf Swing, 1902
Oil on canvas
Follow That Is Priceless on Social Media and GoComics (the Link button):
Click to Follow This Blog or Share This Masterpiece:
Info, or perhaps links that point to more info, about this artist can be found here, perhaps in addition to what’s in his German Wikipedia page (Google translated, if necessary).
/// A famed frugal fast food franchise buys
Karl’s potatoes to sell them as fries,
but this harvest was botched.
Karl could swear he is watched
by a few hundred unblinking eyes.
/// Karl’s a vegan. From meat he’ll abstain.
Won’t eat anything born with a brain.
And yet spuds grow and thrive
and are clearly alive.
When he digs them up, might they feel pain?
/// He pulls living things out of the soil.
Some get baked or else cut up to boil.
With a sharp tool cooks wield,
skin from flesh may be peeled
and then dropped, sliced, into boiling oil!
/// A potato’s not human, Karl knows.
When you cut them, no red fluid flows.
Yet preparing them seems
torture in his daydreams.
(His Potato Head toys caused his woes.)
/// “Woke” Potato Head, bad-mouthed by preachers,
is that rarest of genderless creatures.
Hasbro says it dismisses
the names “Mr.” or “Mrs.”
since it has interchangeable features.
/// Yet when Karl as a youngster had played,
putting faces on tubers dismayed
him, and made them seem real.
Might they see, think and feel?
In the back of his mind this thought stayed.
/// He is quite down-to-earth as a rule,
but at times enjoys playing the fool.
Though he thinks it is “flirty”
when he gets down and dirty,
to his hoes he is just one more tool.