ugliness,
i learnt,
sitting in the back with my chair
tipped further back still
and heel tapping a rhapsody against the floor,
while wandering fingers found
dried-up gum and scratched-in graffiti,
is not welcome in literature.
prose and verse should endear themselves,
they should kiss the reader chastely on the lips with frosted pink lipstick
and smell of vanilla-behind-the-ear
and tuck one leg over the other,
neatly,
and give demure smiles and wiggles of piano player's fingers to the man on the other side of the road.
and so i stuck to similes
and meter
and rhyme,
and boasting adjectives
and dictionary definitions
and full stops capital letters and regiment grammar
my words like soldiers
my pen a general
my page a no-man's-land
of complex simple compound sentences used in equal supply
and clauses that cut themselves short
with the pop of a pen
and then i learnt,
wrapped up in bed
with ginsberg laying himself out before me
and a thousand poets throwing meter to the wind,
that art oozes itself through
the barbed wire cages of convention
and makes itself ugly
to make itself known.
art gnashes teeth stained yellow
and broken at critics
rises at the back of a classroom and howls bloody murder
cracks mirrors and snaps necks and screams itself rough
to make you feel.
a beautiful poem
i say
is one that knows it isn't.
