This Awkward Art [poem]
This life is a latticework of leftover
drownful dreams which, when painted
with our drainlike thinned-out blood,
leaves desperadoed ebbing stains
of wholly homemade gravy-feigning
pigment wash upon the canvas
brushstrokes’ brave and brackish
left-outsided wilting undergush.
This awkward art becomes a tidal
surface stream of bobbing buoys
(beware that this is not the straight
marine show that it first may seem)
whose little sirens sound [then not]
as Doppler works his magic near
a vacant space inside our brains with
tough finesse (but now I do digress).
Each wave to multigrace our stulted
stilted forward-facing bruised and long
unmoment’s actuality will soon recede
with fast indecent haste as we, with
undue process (so I think), admit with
bald finality that everything we see and
feel and think we understand and lust
and know with pride is merely travesty.
Why can’t you give us hope, you cry.
But I, bereft of fawning sycophance,
who long ago unclothed myself of any
trace of ostrich innocence, can never
sugarcoat the garnished pill no matter
how intent you crude decide to dirtly be.
For if you cannot bring upon my gilded table
pulchritudinousful poetry, there cannot ever
truly be that creature known as youandme.
© 2012, Alan Morrison
The Naked Troubadour 