Dark House

Cruddy smells flake off the house and I know I shouldn’t be here.

No one has in faithless year after faithless year.

Knock it off.

I see you filching my backup plans from my purse.

God I wear blue well.

My soul is transparent like the cleanest lake.

 

I am without my numbers and shapes,

sewn from cotton fields.

I’m a doll you can love, hate, dissipate.

Intrusive Thoughts

Glittering shrapnel claws deep in my mind,

embedding vicious thoughts caught in my hands

like a virus,

like a child leaping into my arms,

like a newspaper thrown against my door by a brat.

Why can’t I expel the mental graft and gristly slander

that permeates myself?

Does gold feel worthless when desperate divorcees toss

it in the sea

to forget?

To remember rage?

Art History

Quiet art history is just as dazzling as fireworks,

the artist’s eyes fluttering open in the morning an explosion of a bomb.

See the veracity of the paintbrush,

The verifiable anguish in colors prone to roam the white space,

the place where luck dies.

What arguments have painters had with invalid ideas,

high on their laudanum and making no sense to anyone but

the artist, a doctor for chartreuse concepts that long to be a lively lime.

What canonical cloudscapes inspired the Sistine chapel?

What childish memory provoked David?