Parted Painting

It was a sad affair and nothing I could do about it.  Such is a small fact of life.  The painting still hangs in the corridor of, if not power than certainly, pain and I'm sure it is not looked upon with any kind of fondness.
  I lay listlessly trying not to respond to the hectoring Little Englander spokesperson arguing for a true and pure national race.  There was already a headache rummaging in my head and I was on my last Asprin of the day.
   It was neatly painted, neater than anything I had done previously, which was a cause of suspicion as before I had almost disregarded all techniques I had ever learned.
  My old master was a trying man, he tried his hand to almost everything but kept coming back to what he knew.
  I had studied beside him watching his work and hand with my eye attempting to take it all in.  The eye, he once told me is like a pool ready to be filled with any dye worth the colour.  Things have been swimming in them ever since.  I still learn a lot by thinking of him- the lusty European- but he can't still my headaches or do justice to my situation, that pains me daily.
  What is it about the English?  Their pig-headedness, their unruly stubbornness,  their crass faith.  What does it all boil down to?  That portrait,.. I wouldn't have bothered if I knew the trouble it would cause me, as it is simply not worth it, not worth it at all.  What would I know?
  Of course the joke is that it was on commission, that it wasn't my idea to have it painted, that came later.  That's another thing the English are short of: Irony.  Not short of it, but short of picking it up, of perceiving it when it comes into view.  Ha bloody ha.
  Yeah, that painting, I'm sure my old master would have been proud of me for having done it.  A real realistic piece, none of the clouded concrete of abstraction, but something full of the details of the ruddy sordid world.  I never thought I would admit it but Lucien Freud is heroic in his work he attempts and does, admist a grey and dying Lowry landscape.
  Such pains artists undertake to follow though with their visions of reality, but there are many ways of seeing.
  Even though I had worked on that painting for many hours every aspect of that image is starting to fade and I know I could never refresh it again.
  The guy in the corner is getting louder and I could knock him out before getting myself kicked out before getting myself kicked out into the beating cold and trying to establish my feet again.  I drink up my whiskey and toy with ordering another while I wondered about that big house where one of my finest works rested in, never to be seen again,