08-29-2016, 07:59 AM
I AM (K)OROT
I am Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot,
or rather his son--
the son he’s ashamed of;
the son he keeps hidden in his attic,
along with all of his failed discarded paintings.
I sleep on knotted wooden floors.
Once his studio, almost every inch been christened with encrusted paint.
Sometimes I wonder through the dense forest of covered, dusty furniture
and squares of lush, half-realized woodland I can never enter.
Other times I just sit and stare.
Since my abandonment, I too have taken up the brush.
It fills my days and nights,
and gives me dreams of vengeance even lusher than his most overgrown Arcadia.
Will he find them,
after I am long gone
and my atoms have dispersed between the floorboards
and onto the dinner table below,
sprinkling their heads during their after-church Sunday feast?
Sitting there so pious,
it will beckon him upstairs.
When he pushes aside the forest he left for me:
his shimming paintings;
the swirling floral patterned armchair…
stained;
and finally the golden mirror, sculpted with gazing cherubs…
catching a quick glance of his reflection
and the jarring repulsion of his pockmarked face,
he will stumble INTO them.
He did not want them,
so I painted over them.
I “completed” them,
as he sought to complete nature—
for he did not want to complete me.
His once swaying trees
halted
CRYSTALIZED.
The very air that they breathed, so full
and so healing,
Now an atmosphere of thick gel.
Of Venus.
Some parts so thin,
like the moon.
The yellow-oranges and orange-yellows
pushed to sick heavy yellows and blasphemous reds.
His grays were gray.
The cooling blues... gone too,
and so were the nymphs and satyrs who drank from them.
Now boys
The kind he sought to escape
and lied to himself for
that he did not need them…
didn’t need their rules,
(broken as they were)
and their sticks
sharp and blinding
ripping each other apart
into a colorful, drunken, obscene, decayed, sweaty, incandescent orgy--
calling to mind that day when the demons finally broke through the rocky ceiling of the Underworld
and pissed in all the rivers,
burning the Elysian fields to ashes,
and raping every zombie in the fields of Asphodel,
and filling Tartarus to the brim with shit.
Blank his stare
Anger forcing his fists together, clinching… strangling…
something...
knelling down,
his bony knees on knotted wood,
he will breathe deeply all of my decayed, scattered atoms--
the ones left in the floorboards,
only to arise
and calmly readjust his evening jacket
only to stepped lightly back down the stairs
and resumed his dinner.
Will I change him? Could I?
Yes. Extra gravy on his mashed potatoes,
before returning that night.
I am Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot,
or rather his son--
the son he’s ashamed of;
the son he keeps hidden in his attic,
along with all of his failed discarded paintings.
I sleep on knotted wooden floors.
Once his studio, almost every inch been christened with encrusted paint.
Sometimes I wonder through the dense forest of covered, dusty furniture
and squares of lush, half-realized woodland I can never enter.
Other times I just sit and stare.
Since my abandonment, I too have taken up the brush.
It fills my days and nights,
and gives me dreams of vengeance even lusher than his most overgrown Arcadia.
Will he find them,
after I am long gone
and my atoms have dispersed between the floorboards
and onto the dinner table below,
sprinkling their heads during their after-church Sunday feast?
Sitting there so pious,
it will beckon him upstairs.
When he pushes aside the forest he left for me:
his shimming paintings;
the swirling floral patterned armchair…
stained;
and finally the golden mirror, sculpted with gazing cherubs…
catching a quick glance of his reflection
and the jarring repulsion of his pockmarked face,
he will stumble INTO them.
He did not want them,
so I painted over them.
I “completed” them,
as he sought to complete nature—
for he did not want to complete me.
His once swaying trees
halted
CRYSTALIZED.
The very air that they breathed, so full
and so healing,
Now an atmosphere of thick gel.
Of Venus.
Some parts so thin,
like the moon.
The yellow-oranges and orange-yellows
pushed to sick heavy yellows and blasphemous reds.
His grays were gray.
The cooling blues... gone too,
and so were the nymphs and satyrs who drank from them.
Now boys
The kind he sought to escape
and lied to himself for
that he did not need them…
didn’t need their rules,
(broken as they were)
and their sticks
sharp and blinding
ripping each other apart
into a colorful, drunken, obscene, decayed, sweaty, incandescent orgy--
calling to mind that day when the demons finally broke through the rocky ceiling of the Underworld
and pissed in all the rivers,
burning the Elysian fields to ashes,
and raping every zombie in the fields of Asphodel,
and filling Tartarus to the brim with shit.
Blank his stare
Anger forcing his fists together, clinching… strangling…
something...
knelling down,
his bony knees on knotted wood,
he will breathe deeply all of my decayed, scattered atoms--
the ones left in the floorboards,
only to arise
and calmly readjust his evening jacket
only to stepped lightly back down the stairs
and resumed his dinner.
Will I change him? Could I?
Yes. Extra gravy on his mashed potatoes,
before returning that night.