Consider the Artist

You’d do anything to be considered an artist.
Anything.
You told me the pain you’ve inflicted on yourself and your friends
In order to get the perfect brush stroke,
Perfect flash,
Perfect smudge.
Throw away your jewelry
For a hermit house life
But keep your watch in a drawer
To keep your mind.
You unhinged your jaw
For a mouthful of charcoal.
Dry lips sputter and reverse
Onto a canvas.
Stand back and study,
Black lines, Rorschach shapes and
Empty dusted spaces.
Wrinkle your brow, stamp out the picture.
Look at your feet and cut off a toe.
You’d do anything to be considered an artist.

apartment profile

August 12th 2009

We’re hiding in a new place
where no bricks, nor traffic can distract our waves.
No sparks traverse these walls,
only flames on stalks mar the paint.
A web from the ceiling collects our things,
from glory hats to acrobats with thread bobs in between.
On entering the room, there’s a tangy smell,
soon hampered by the dust and smoke,
but brought back up by peels in colors from side to side.
Clay for our stick-ash and a bed on the rug,
everything we need is presented.
It stripped from us the will to buy, the will to walk
and the need for change.
In minutes, we knew that we wanted to add our stain.
We wanted to mark like the flames
and we wanted the untainted rooms
to drink our taint.

arctic bones

Arctic Bones

You smell like sugar cane.
The raw, coarse scent strung between my nose and tongue
Was carried on the ship powered by the wind and rain,
From whose decks you wished to be flung.

Fog crept over the salty seas,
Brine water soaking your dress.
The dampening cloth clung to your knees,
And your sharpened heart it did possess.

I picture you standing at the bow,
Fists clenching the corroded wood,
So far from the field and the farmer’s plow.
So far from the place where we both stood.

Now the warm air caresses your cheek,
And closing your eyes, you think.
Perhaps the skeleton of the boat is rotting and weak,
And the ship will surely sink.

The destination is still a looming mystery,
For you boarded the ship with no shore in mind.
Maybe awaiting you is a land of history,
With a buried treasure for you to find.

You mirror the waves lapping the frame;
With a silky exterior that will drag you under
And leave you open for blame,
A prime target for thunder.

You yearn to throw yourself into the tossing grey ocean,
To sink down among the sandy stones.
But the heat and the ice would cause a commotion,
Because you’ve got arctic bones.

Lady, run.

Lady, run through the tall grass
and let your sweet hair fall down.
Your ankles are bitten and your fingers are raw
and stained with blood and a berry’s juice.
It’s been days since you’ve been seen,
Days since anyone has told you what color the sun is,
And what smell the river gives off at dawn.
You’ve been too busy trailing your way off of pages
And into the eyes of wilderness fighters,
Torturous spiders and half-hearted builders.
Still you curl and burn with your eyes closed
And your mouth open to taste the scenery and sense
The way the world moves about you.
You anchor the trees through braided roots,
Bended branches and sculpted groves.
You are mud, you are dry and you stick the world
To the sky and hold it.
Like Atlas you stand, proud but haunted
For if you open your eyes, you will surely
Burst at the seams.
Lady, run through the bleached bark
And let your sweet hair be singed.

the one that doesn't sleep

With the natural rhythm of breath,
A warm wave hits the cold glass.
Staring out to the streets below,
Around a corner, down a block,
I see the lights shining brighter
Than the stars have ever blinked.
It’s unnatural to be so enthralled
By something utterly stale.

I’ve see this before
All over the world.
Every corner is the same.
But the translations are different.
It’s constantly moving,
Always flashing,
Always dying
And always surviving.

If it stopped, only for a second,
I think I should be cured.

The Goblin-Child

He lurks beneath stones,
under river bridges,
out of sight of passing people.
Not ugly,
not favorable.
Grumpy.
Children laughed
and threw sticks,
but he warned them away
with a chubby, stubby finger
and a rasping howl
from his orange lips.
Not ugly,
not favorable.
Grumpy.
Ages have been spent
catching birds and feasting.
Rumble snoring and scratching.
I’d be grumpy too
if I had a goblin mother
and a goblin father.

Brush

We painted the walls to shield our eyes.
Nestled in between the land beyond
And the golden lakes,
Our house crumbles under the weight.

Timber beams crack and groan from the wind
and the stones begin to break.
It’s a house we know, it’s a house we love.
it’s a house we need to leave.

Abandoned apart from the memory of battle.
A scarred chimney and a jumbled pathway
Offset the quiet door, sunken into the wall,
But do not cover it up.

An entrance so enchanting,
That a glimmer and a spark of wonder washes over you
But not us.
We still have paint on our knuckles.

I wish we could bead together the dew
And make a string that will lead us from the fields,
But our sense of direction would lead us astray.

And maybe we’d wander forever through our known trails,
Or to a new town where nobody knew our names.
If only we’d be so lucky,
We could wash the paint from our hands.

foreign

With a drooping jaw and a downcast stare,
History laces his stubble.
He has seen and he has heard.
It has been imagined.

Scuffed leather shoes formed to his toes,
Hands deep in his pockets, cigarette in his mouth,
And he walked into the pale shattered light.
Was he fleeing from a woman? Or maybe a man?
As the immense towers shot through the sky,
Tainting it’s aura with gray dirty stone,
The man simply sighed.
It has been imagined.

An accordion bounces notes through the streets,
A Parisian grins at the stranger,
Now on a bicycle with a dusty coat on his back.
An endless crowd of faces part for him,
Swiftly turning from the heart of the city,
Hiding from the shade and stepping into the sun.
It has been imagined.

A place of ice,
A faery nation of white and pale blonde,
The man with dark hair sits on a bench,
With a ragged dog at his side.
He would not dream of tainting the clean air with tobacco,
Plus, his fingernails were finally clean.
A chill broke his thoughts.
It has been imagined.

Nearly twenty years before,
With curls to his jaw,
He stepped off of iron and onto foreign land
For the first time.
With no exotica, he was puzzled.
Now he runs, wanders and searches
For the place he created as a boy.
It has been imagined.