We Are the Mad Artist
the portraits of Alone haunt me through the day.
they greet me in the morning,
shards of sunlight, happy jailstripes on the kitchen sink,
drowning in dirty, broken dishes.
they spit me from the house,
leaving the sleeping mother to sleep away the aches
of head and heart,
and they follow me down the time-cracked sidewalk:
they paste their bloodshot eyes my way,
and steer their glass bottle carts clear of my
home-soaked hands.
they sigh in frustration, humiliation
at the empty, gum-peppered desks, and scream
silently at the filled:
listen, listen. learn, remember, change. Be.
they black-and-blue those inculpable faces,
and take the black and blue in turn.
they cough, sniff, sob, retch
behind the peeling, creaking, storyboard
of love and hate,
of portraits of people trying to make love, prove hate,
and justify the presence of everything
and the absence of everything else.
their grating voices glare through the torn black
mesh of the front door,
long before my creaking footsteps cross the porch.
the portraits of Alone yell, scream, cry, wonder,
throw, crash, hide, bleed,
beg, pray, wish, hope, wonder, and sleep.
They stare back at me through the window of nothing,
the black, blue, yellow painted glass man
more real than the broken, breathing dead.
but the portraits of Alone are never-ending
in the windows of nothing.
when the painted glass men become the dead,
and the broken, breathing look away,
they all become the portraits of Alone,
and they all become the portraits.
and they all become.
