.
.
Things devolve, reveal
themselves to be extraneous
extremities, eventually obtruding
obfuscating
tender slender and insensate
lines that bunch up
like the spines of broken
babies’ bodies thrown into
a common grave: little
ones whom nobody can save;
geometric chaos waiting
for a wave to sluice them
.
back into the sea in
which, disintegrating, they will
find escape, at last,
from obloquy. Is contempt
the generating force that
drives the green fuse through
the flower? Dylan Thomas didn’t
promise happiness.
Who can promise that? And
yet, and yet, I rise
to shave my head in
public and to dye my beard
.
a tawny brown and raise an
arm alluringly so it can
frame my gleaming pate,
somehow rendering to it
a lyric sense of biceps you
would be attracted to,
if things like that attracted
you. My drawings start
as sketches and then grow
to wretched and unruly
size, indefensible: complex
for no good reason, or none
.
beyond a treason in the
soul which strives to hoodwink
roaming eyes into regarding
its thick overlays of colors
given texture by the
random sticky use of crayons,
bleeding markers, pencils,
waxy, wet, fat, thin anointed
implements of my decision
to provision space with
something I can bear to
see, as wise. I like them when
.
they’re done. They seem to
have such fun, all blundering
and wondering, caring not
a whit that their multiloquy –
the quality of never
being other than excessively
loquacious, never shutting
up or saying anything that
matters (bodacious and capaciously
rapacious are
the sorts of rhymes whose
visual equivalents it traffics in)
.
– more than deserves that
obloquy those tender slender
and insensate lines that
bunch up like the spines
of broken babies’ bodies thrown
into a common grave
nobody can save. Sometimes
I wish my drawings would
behave. Other times I don’t.
Indeed, I must confess
I rather love it – much
prefer it - when they won’t.
.