Blink by Aayudh Pramanik

[aayudh]

It’s honestly unfair, to let the scholars

With all their ranks and distinctions and degrees,

Reserve their,

Platinum thrones,

Wield the right to weave and set fire,

To art.

I met a girl who had lost all her life, 

Poured all of her into

Glasses full of holes.

And she was an artist.

She used to paint in mud with streamlined 

Kanji Brush strokes, 

Carve out cryptic genius 

Through discarded, spat on oak,

Her lead lined eyeballs, 

Provoked

The most guttural dissimulations

They made my creativity quiver and tremble,

Shatter records and surpass boundaries, they all assembled,

On summer nights and the winter dawn lights

My feet dipped in the cold moist grass.

So many of them had turned a deplorable amber,

Encased in hickory brown borders. 

 

Her rapidly flaking skin, 

Burnt in napalm hues 

Of anarchy and subservience simultaneously

What a miracle it was

Watching her dismantle herself 

Into infinity all at once

And yet accept incapacitation in a mere vessel

Of blood bones and flesh.

 

She was an artist

And her art was never certified

And yet the only difference

Between her art and those accepted

Was that, her art explained you

And you explained the others,

And your explaination of the others

Were never yours, but consensus.

Consensus of limited

Ignorant

Complacent

Minds.

 

She brought dead butterflies back to life

With her chameleon water colours

And her fingers were the closest something

Would ever get to perfect.

I often asked her to unscrew jars,

Just to stare at the galaxies of brilliance in them.

 

Her voice sprouted life,

And was what kept the grasses alive

From the shadow cast over them by,

A very capitalist concept of success. 

Her voice was what kept the clocks ticking in our realities,

They commanded everything that knew what to look up to.

 

But like I said, she wasted all her life

Poured all her colours into a plastic monochrome

Expectation of art.

You can reduce a spectrum to black and white, 

But there’s no going back from there.

Once the colours are lost, sacrificed, they’re gone for good.

She lives on in moth eaten, yellowed books

And in the airspace between two teeth flanking a missing one in between.

She lives on in crooked smiles 

And painters and poets and singers and 

Innovation, inchoate. 

She lives on in the locket locking us,

Into the future and branding us into the past.

She was an artist.

She healed the dying one in me,

She was an artist.

[Susan Katz]

Thank you so very much for sharing this powerful and beautifully written (some great images) poem for consideration for Featured Poem of the Month for June.  You have captured, not only a mood, but a message and I am truly touched by your words.  Thank you again for sharing, Susan

[Author]

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