The Art Room

Some kids found their rooms:
Math room pizza parties for those held in place by statistics,
four mirrored walls enclosing those given strong bodies pressing iron into muscle,
a tiny box for the Special broken off and hidden from the general population.
Those who went to the art room followed the music:
Stacks of scratched mix cds flourished with magic marker,
curated directly from fresh teenage hearts
made into sound flying over Doc's Art II class
as they sketch, carve, snack and chat.
The only room where students are allowed
to talk to each other all period
and pencils work to produce souls
instead of information.
There, the ineffable takes shape, in papier-mache, 
macaroni or glitter.

Here are the kids who knew how
to make mistakes. Perched on stools,
napping on the couch in the back,
the duds, the nerds, building things, hanging out,
shaving sculptures into their scalps. Their minds escaping
in paint-smear, light and earth, becoming amorphous blobs,
new species of globule bacteria squirming across a slide of canvas,
things under the microscope, not for interrogation,
but for companionship.
They reach no understanding with the world through movement
or the way the colors talk
to each other, they only reanimate the confusion into something
they can be friendly with.
Visions surface from the blank stare
of a white page.
They know how to get rid of that white;
just start getting it dirty.
Eventually it begins to look like something
clean.

Nate starts new genres every class
though he plays no instrument: oy-punk, ska-core, pinhead blues.
Corban and Chip engineer robots
from their dad's junked wiper blades and orphaned gadgetry.
Quiet Jennifer looks
into the peeled aperture of her camera.
Golden Nick sketches always,
scoring every conversation with his etching.
Their eyes cast aloof
from what everyone else is trained to see,
staring into discouraged hallucinations.
Unable to convince themselves the visions aren't there,
they exorcise them through messes of paint, wavering clay,
kilns burning mud into permanent shape. Splotched
mistakes arch gracefully into unforeseen purposes, the erroneous made integral.
What is discarded or shamed in other rooms is here followed with curiosity,
rescued and incorporated into a perfectly rendered mess
of liquid. The rejected is what was, what became.
Here kids let their hearts out, casually, without having to explain them,
like red paint from a shiny new tube.
Can't everybody see it? It's up there on the wall, collaged out of glue-stick
and diced magazine scrap.
They don't have to clarify it in the desperate pomp
of a poem or the insipid glitz of jazz hands. Put on the run by the logical requests
of Spanish teachers, they can relax here,
and so they are real, and so they are different.

As adults, they still use what they learned there. I watch them. They are my friends;
bartenders or line cooks or nurses or clerks, their basements are cluttered
with bric-a-brac, creative purchases, bought not out of necessity,
but simply because they explode the room into life:
A creek painting amended with a rhinestone deer cutout,
the orange booth of a defunct bowling alley,
Happy Meal characters leftover from obsolete Saturday mornings.
Their dens are hung with 4th grade prize-winners, Governor's Show picks,
a woodcarving of an eagle so ugly only a Mom could keep it hung
on her bathroom wall for thirty years.
Exacto knives and staedtler erasers point
from Warhol coffee cups on drafting tables,
T-Squares and light boxes are dragged through a gamut of low-rent apartments.

Maybe in the cupboard, maybe out in the garage,
a box lies closed
but not empty,
filled with crinkled tubes
of hardened oil, a palette stained
with a multifarious rash of colors,
a forest of stiffened brushes growing
from a ceramic ashtray.
Every now and then they put a record on,
pull this box out, open it
and again, with a little insistence,
the colors come flowing.