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.

Mixed

I pierce the clouds with light
beneath the print of No. 6
hanging over my mantle
you send your showers down
orange blue yellow
shaking from the canvas
the window becomes
the painting in water and glass
raindrops assuming the yellow
flowers and black leaves
quaking in the wind
we drown into each other
almost breaking from our bodies
we plunge completely
as the violins purple fumes
rise over the room

my favorite part of you
is the little absence
where I can put myself

the drops wrench apart
and bleed down the glass
into the earth
they will never be
what they were before
as red and blue blended are no
longer red and blue but purple
as the blood mixed in our veins
as you mixed in my arms

The Soft

We're all so goddamned special aren't we? Everyone I know is an artist, a musician, a philosopher, a writer, an actor, a director, a dancer, and sometimes all of these things at once. Myself included. I'm probably the worst offender of all. It'd be a real shame if we didn't share our unique and profound minds with the world, if we didn't "express ourselves" (probably one of the most vile phrases in the language). I'm not sure, but I suspect that real art isn't about self-expression at all and that self-expression is basically a form of masturbation.

And what will happen to us? Some will be ground up and packaged and earn a lot of money making advertisements. Some will live in once-grand Victorian mansions furnished with soggy old couches and grimacing bookshelves, blocks from the colleges where we teach. Others will vomit up our creativity in the morning with last night's beer and go wait tables. Some will frequent coffee houses and grow so fat in the head with smarm and knowledge that we will barely fit through the holes of our turtlenecks. A handful of us might actually have something brilliant and original to say, and will be completely miserable for it.

I don't know if I could live any other way.