Back to the Factory

The artist is a freak –

a warrior with mutant ears

(the things he hears!) – his art’s a helpless

creature in his care. Neither is nor ever will

become aware of what the other does,

will do, will be or was; it’s not

within the slippery circumference

of what they guess are their intentions

to know more than that they stumble through

the untoward manufacture of a wonder,

when it happens, which is rare,

all done in an unconscious dark

and usually wounding art, though sometimes

not. When not, they’ve a pot to piss in!

They release their flow, and systems go,

and art and artist start to breathe a different air.

They know that something’s there;

though don’t know what. Soon art becomes

an invalid again, and artist numbs himself

for war, and when as usual he can’t find any

enemy, he mumbles to the scrawny blue thing

parked and hung upon his torso

and refractorily stumbles with it

through, into, a new unconscious dark –

back to the factory.

.