Art

I was standing nose-close to a painting
the size of my living room and half
the kitchen at the Albright-Knox
in Buffalo. The burgundy bouqueted

like wine and the monotonous canvas
stretched and pulled like a millennial
conversation. I didn’t get it.
Post-modernism is so anti-rhyme

it gets old. When I got home, I bought
canvas, acrylics, brush. After a liter
of cheap Merlot I was ten dollars broke
on the back porch, careful to cover the boards,

the bristles splattering Azure and Bone
and Cedar onto clean slates until Pollock
himself would have smashed empty bottles
into the fireplace. Sheer madness—

what creates. A mistake, to believe I could
duplicate. Afterwards, I discreetly tuck
my secret ambitions like hand sewn folios
into lavender dresser drawers, hidden

like manuscripts, Coptic scriptures buried
in tomes secure from my insecurities that
art is not as easily negotiable as I would like,
that Pollock was a drunk, yes, but no imposter.