Art Class

A triptych

1.

You don’t go to art class anymore

Just like you don’t relearn mathematical differentiation

Or try rock climbing or swing dancing anew

You are dead aspen bark

you are not a new bud

Root tendrils dried and curdled

Growth potential in the red as in blood

Where there were once reams of self prophecies

Of bestselling books of art and polygotacy

There remains only dull tongues

Aping coloniser lingua franca

You will never be ballerina

A model a state ambassador an actor

Ambition rots in tandem as all your hope decays

Air castles will be built raided demolished every day

Cassandra shaves her head and decides to become a nun

Of hopeful hypotheticals and dream words she has been rendered mute mum and dumb

2.

You don’t go to art class anymore

To paint create to worldbuild seize the jour

You must drag your sack of blood your miasmic stinking shell

To the art shop the book shop the typewriter by your very self

Where once there were bracelet beads paint tubes pens at your beck and call

You find your heart prisoner to the home the hearth the clock

Your find your corpse flayed alive, your fairy wishes butterfly pinned to the walls

You can not move can not make you receive no sainted muses call

You try to learn to tap dance break everyone bone and fall fall fall

3.

You won’t go to art class evermore

Or rhyme in Hindi French Spanish or Persian

You spent four years at university learning diddly squat

An intellectual, socioeconomic perversion

All your past present futures thus doomed to imperfect

Heartless and experience barren, all emotion drizzles off your surface

What ideal could your signifiers signify?

What synapses your great novel stir?

Doom yourself to more fruitless learning thinking reading

And leave your telos and your logos all ablur