An Artist Dreams of Tomorrow

[Pseudomuse]

Dreaming of something more appropriate
Like Van Gogh’s Starry Night or Proserpine’s Garden
Than
Mimicking Diego Rivera in Times Square
Plaster paint is everywhere
Hand prints litter all the clothing I own
Vivid in colors of ecstasy
From passionred to polaroidblue

Is there a difference between an artist and a creep---?
I could never tell
Maybe that’s something
This life can’t answer for me
Along with all the reasons you left

I didn’t even see you leave between
Casual brushstrokes and calligraphic templates
Reasoning there way pass electrifying spindles of imagination
I didn’t even see through our heated catastrophe
You slipping out the back door

Is their a reason in art? Is their art in reason?
I always wondered that
Curled in my hibernated state of elusive thoughts
And patterned responses

Splattered multi-tonal acrylics
Cake along the rips edges of my wallpapered room
Along with shards of broken vinyl
Pasted to the filmy plaster with Elmer’s glue
Blue sketches of La Tour Eiffel are my only reminders
Of life outside this conclave

I’m dreaming in aquatic references
To your aquaphobia
Wondering why you even told me
You were going to the coast
You always hated water
Said you couldn’t swim (I always thought you just didn’t)
Something about fear of the unknown or something just as surreal

I see you in old tabloid mags
Folded and stabled to the door
Holding that crooked smile at half mast
Like a truce flag

Was there a difference between you and me?
Or was the problem that we were la même âme
La même chose – the same thing
That you couldn’t like me any better than you liked yourself
Was that the difference? Was that the reason you flew away?
Was that the logic that left me hanging by the threadmoments
Of forever and goodbye?

I don’t know the answers
I never let on I did
I never pretended to know any thing
Except portrait and line and light
And color

I looked in all the books I could find
Some old journals even
Old photographs
To find an answer but
The conclusion—the revolving door of thought assures me
That I’ve never asked to the right
Question

So I try to dream of a tomorrow
A tomorrow that’s more appropriate than this hollowed self-sinking portrait
Something Monet and his lilies would be proud of
Like Constable’s landscapes or Renoir’s impressions
Not
This socialist representation of mocking saints
That dances across my niche

Plaster paint and acrylics are everywhere
Biting a freezer burn into my hands
And hand prints that scale the brink
Outside the one window are
Vivid plates of incandescence
And evanescence
That can only be described as truth