Put Those Crayons Down

A friend of mine recently discovered Google street view & has been ‘visiting’ various houses, apartments, streets, schools she went to in the past. Some of which has triggered unhappy memories, some happy recollections. Soon there will be GooglePast, or an iPast app, where you can gaze into those old days – there must be a sci-fi story about this already – where one can see a brief glimpse of that first kiss, that first queer bashing.

A couple of recent Go Viral prompts sent me into my past. I went into my personal archives & unearthed several ‘paintings’ I did in the early 70’s. It’s been some years since I looked at them at all. I took pictures of them & have posted a couple as pics to go with my daily poem. A couple I couldn’t bring myself to to even photograph though – troubled memories with real razor blades incorporated. At least I was expressing my pain somehow – using the blades on the paper and not myself.

Critics (put those crayons down)

you call that colouring

if you can’t stay in the lines

why bother

why waste money on colouring books

you’ll never be an artist

till you can colour within the lines

you’ll never be a great writer

with handwriting like that

you have to write between the lines

not over them

not in slanting dribbles across the page

you’ll never be a writer

till you learn how to spell

you don’t smoke up

were never sexually abused as a child

don’t have a chemical imbalance of some sort

then you don’t have enough suffering

to be worth listening to

you’ll never be genius

you’re just too well-balanced

to be authentically creative

your too old too fat too queer

put those crayons down

it’s too late for you

no

Here’s another of the April poems:

Pride

I did this

it was not what I set out to do

it got out of hand

took on a life of its own

made my life hell for a while

wishing I had better control

that my technique was more precise

needing it to get back on track

be what I dreamed it could be

I couldn’t get a handle on it

but I saw it though

even though I was disappointed in myself

and now

people tell me

it may be best thing I’ve ever done

how did I do it

I don’t explain

I accept the praise

they think my lack of boasting pride

is some sort of humility

but my silence is because

I don’t understand

how it came to be

yet I’m certainly glad it came to be

though me