Saltwater-Based Pastels

I am tired, I am weary
I could sleep for a thousand years
A thousand dreams that would awake me
Different colors made of tears

- Lou Reed


Saltwater-Based Pastels


Paint your face

with love and grace, dear,

bewitching dreamily

the shattered smug. Sharpen

your prehensile pencils,

grasping your blanched canvas

for hopes of release.


The waterworks arrive,

florid salvos of colors

ashen, the rainy run-off

of human expression

carving future Grand Canyon's

of age and regret,

defiled deceit.


Purely emotive

Day-Glo dalliances,

these droplets of mania gush

ever driven, forever draining.

Deriving sense from delirium

found

in a clichéd heave of chest.


Eyelids wilt in twilight,

still life flowers

with swollen petals

whose buds blossom and balloon

into portals of perception,

ocular instruments which bequeath

a tonnage that’s torrential.

Blue Jean Reverie

Eyes stare, avert, stare, avert.

Islander flesh smiling,

peeking through

from a horizontal slit

in cutoffs, pointing like a finger

to the vertical slit nearby

that leaves one

punch drunk.

Hips sway, enchant, swain, enchant.

Sun baked pigment, the same

as everything else

visible and less sacred, but

closer to the cotton-covered

birthplace of all things

cosmic and karmic.

In we go

into

indigo, these vertigo transmissions,

cerulean, never certain,

always searching for something

to define the transitory effects

of a young girl in shorts

on this old man’s mind.

Heart sparks, crumbles, sparks, crumbles.