the grade schooler draws my picture.

I am not at all subcrustal. Nor my legs proximal parted; the gloved hands I can see clear thru.

The ground laid with hay likenesses, then cut off like the vanquished Jesus. Little child,

you've drawn my lips black as bituminous coal. No more! My heart cries through a mouth bloated

as if dead but it's how I see the world. And I wonder how they knew, no different than the heartbreak

that left me dis-assembled until designed to be assemble somewhere else like the cubes

of Matisse cutouts  or the yellow cloth sheets used at the tent city that  the homeless chose as protest.

Yet every red a marathon. A every little bit of  blue, a sky on fire. And every chestnut broken

from its branch a brain blown out against the white contracting.  I am hardly healed from

the last time I posed , when someone loved told me that they found someone who flings the stars

around when kissed. I can't do that. But I can watch the purple washable glue sticks drying like fish.

And I can drop in that pot of beans that slice of salt pork saved before the smoke-house burned down.

And ain't it funny how you thought that was ok then, but now a watered down  kiss is all it takes to

please you.

Reviews

[Olivia]

Reading this piece i felt connected and satisfied in a reader sort of way. Great piece

[Blotted Ink Productions]

This is freaking awesome. That is all.

[Beccy]

Aside from a perfect description of the kind of drawing which would be instantly recognised as coming from the hand of a child, (those see-through gloved hands are so acutely familiar,) this, for me, charts our journey through life, the joys and disappointments, the fractures and fissures, without which life would be no more than going through the motions.

From first line to last, and in particular, 'Matisse cutouts' and 'hardly healed from the last time I posed,' this is a genius of a write.

May you never settle for that watered down kiss. Beccy.

[~]

A fractured abstract painting of life through simple lines, that have set the mind of the poet to a realm of life, dreams, and what happened in between.
Well done Dana :D

[CD Campbell]

Brilliant Dana. So many times you have amazed me my reviews end up looking like dog crap in comparison. It's a feeling I have learned to cherish. CD

[Ken Simm.]

Oh bugger! how to review this? Someone once told me who the best poet on here was. They were wrong big time. I've now discovered who I think it is.
Paul Klee always wanted to draw childlike. Much to his chagrin he never did.

[W.k.kortas]

Children and glue sticks, Matisse and "the vanquished Jesus", all these wondrous and skillful interminglings of the childlike and the wordly and world-weary, a whole life rendered in crayon. In the hands of a so-so writer, this could be cloying and too cute by half, but what we have here is how it is done by a magician of the first order.

[Emily B]

the dana that I see is lovely and so very loved

I can't draw like the child, the crayons break and crumble and spill

but if my words could draw, you would be immortal