Painter

The lines underneath your lashes

Are not as deep as the valleys

That exscind your heart

*

You relay all bias

Through the moon

The phases of eclipse and ignition

Even the gravity

That enslaves you to your art

Is both anathema and provision

*

I watch you spread flesh and blood

Over open-faced diaries

Praying that exposure might lend itself

To an ubiquitous cleansing

Praying that the honesty of one

Might translate the voiceless panic

Of an increasingly damaged nation

*

I dread those moments

When your upturned brushes

Find no cause worthy of polemic

Those moments when your palate knife

Euthanizes all endeavor

To see you virulent in the act of creation

Is the substance of my unwashed dreams

So paint and through painting be seen

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