Poem-A-Day #199 : Instructions for How to Engage with Art

Instructions for How to Engage with Art

The canvas wants you to touch it
to run your fingers against the raised strokes

Feel the ochre burnt and otherwise

It wants you to lose yourself in it
to become so encased in its universe
that you will not escape unchanged or at all

It wants to yellow wallpaper you

All of this is contingent on the artist
understanding the canvas well enough
to reveal the need within it

All of this requires you to step closer

To press your chest against the Mona Lisa and to search for her pulse
Take your clothes off and jump into The Water Lilly Pond

Be naked and covered

Poem-A-Day #100 : Things - I Argue

Things - I Argue

     Someone asked me to describe my writing - I paused for millennia - my tongue a hunk of coarse liver in the canyon of my head -

               Eyes are the color of deep water - the Sonic Youth cover of Superstar is on - there is a discussion happening about how art has two definitions - one where it is a commodity and one where it's a dark room with a bathtub full of water and candles and the smell of piñon -

Ultimately personal - don't you remember - the smell of being young and in love with creation - should I quote heavily from the song - baby baby baby oh baby until you feel the same way I do -

     Hardly commercial - not an object you would want above your bed -

               There is the soft glow of something upon a pedestal - the conversation moves to Jeff Koons - his art is fundamentally tied to it being a commodity and what does that say about his process - we are not able to tone that specific bell - being neither known nor interested in balloon dogs ourselves -

How would you describe the sky - a better question - what does walking in the woods feel like - who is water -

     Is Superstar about obsession or about the power of art to control others - or is it a love song - or a stalking song - is it minor that it's all of these things -

               I argue for hours that Post-Modernism is cold an unfeeling - that it only engages with terror and depression as modes of existence -

It's just the radio -