I. Colorful Pompoms Scattered across the Floor as Installation Art
that prodigy’s installation art is such
a babble of atoms.
it looks like an endless orchestral warm-up
with swirls of piccolo
and puffs of tuba
like confetti on one big
dense sheet of sound,
standing still with all the potential
to make the most unexpected motion:
stillness.
i watch like a kitten until some postmodern zealots
block my view.
addicted to Names,
use the fingers in their eyes to mold
the tuneless scatter into
recognizable shapes –
these pieces, they’re eyes,
and those, they’re a nose…
they move on, then some realists
mistake it for litter on the floor, until,
spying an artist’s statement,
they flick it a second glance and say
an inarticulate baby could have done it.
a kitten could have done it.
even they could have done it.
but they didn’t.
it took a god to do it.
II. Anxiety Attack in the Art Museum
Today my psych meds skipped a dose of me.
Zoloft and Abilify
must feel very sorry indeed
while they hear the grains of a colorful sandstorm
gritching and crackling against the windshields of my eyes.
Oil paint, clay, cement, and drywall,
mistaking me for a bull,
pierce my nose with a rusty ring of turpentine odor
in order to drag me away, blind, from my own equilibrium
into a freak’s.
I mean it, it’s the smell.
It’s not the classic faces that look too real.
It’s not the smeary faces that look too unreal.
It’s the surely-toxic pheromones of thinned paint
that taint every article in the museum
in the same way a forgotten corpse
leaves a skewed self-portrait
in a permanent grease spot under the carpet.
Zoloft and Abilify
must feel very sorry indeed.
Whenever I smell art –
that is, every time I hear the word art –
beauty and self-expression are the last particles
to tickle the nose hairs of my memory.
First, I think of carnations.
Then I think of hands
withered over a rosary at room temperature
like old iceberg lettuce,
and I shudder as if I am a nose
all alone in the dark with them.
Oh God, I’m going to die.
Oh God, I’m going to alter the texture of someone’s beautiful canvas
by blowing new chunks on it!
My legs are bending like rotten stems.
Zoloft and Abilify
must feel very sorry indeed.
It must be that art is the physical remains of a thought,
and the smell of art is the smell of their decay.
III. Pompoms Again
my Name is where my atoms end
and everything else begins.
just give my furry little atoms the kick
that I know you’re itching to give them and
they’ll go rolling again, toddling
the floor of the universe like clown-colored hamsters
until they stop somehow in a new scatter
that whimsy only knows.
then what guarantee will there be
that my atoms will not mix with yours?
what then will be my Name,
and what will be yours?
