Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Thoughts on Ambition


Pablo Picasso, Guernica (detail), 1937 / My old dog Cooper


i'm in my childhood bed and my feet are cold

there's a watercolor on my desk but it has too much color on the edges, it looks like it's coming apart, the yellow on the bottom falling off the edge in a flat sheet the color of dog piss

soup in a bowl on the floor is the same color, a slice of it cooling in the spoon

the walls are full, josh hartnett, george clooney, the guy from the o.c., oh alright i know his name, adam brody

mulder and clark gable in white shirts

a painting my mom made of me as a girl looking out the window with red light at my back

my face is blue, the curtain is white and slippery in my small hand

these days i feel like a child waiting for my life to begin

there are things you can't do as a child, you have to wait

i knew it wouldn't come easy but i thought it would come easier, time after school laying itself out like a quilt

for awhile i sat in the sun and worked on my tan, i felt stronger

"gathering my strength like a consumptive in the sun," like diane cluck says

preparing for something unknown that would require a whole warm body and the appearance of athleticism or at least 
health, emotional flexibility

endurance

now i'm a little brown and my breasts are two white triangles, which i like

but the sun is further away and i have to wear socks at night

once again i search out the heat like a snake

in parking lots, corners of rooms, small squares of sunlight, flickering

i'm jealous of people i know who are getting shows, good jobs, i'm happy for them but i feel so far from a world in which that is possible

this bed with the red sheets, red walls, yellow lips of a man from a cut-up catalog, dark green fleece and the copper folds of his face like the gleaming back of a horse

i make paintings almost every day and when i look at them later and see the gray against the pink in the drape of a blanket i feel a surge which is love for a thing that is mine and not mine

but how do you fill a life, especially one so sick with ambition

rising in my throat when i lay down

unemployment, a long half-sleep

although last time i went to the art institute i didn't feel the itch of what i haven't done

i let all those people each have their moment in my day

not like they really need more moments but it isn't a tally system is it

some of them did what they had to do and it's beautiful

here are two gold-colored bookends shaped like shells, i will bring them to my new apartment when i have one

pay my rent with newspaper clippings from my grandmother in colorado and the pieces of my bottom lip that i have bitten off

bringing tears to my eyes

i read that as a girl margaret atwood wanted to write the great canadian novel and then she did

sometimes i go a whole day without touching anyone, even the dog, because i am using my hands to fan my fire

isn't that what those great painter men did all their lives? was it lonely for them?

i think it feels like selfishness because it is selfishness

for me and them both

though what is selfishness and what is just keeping warm

i can have grace sometimes when i need to and i must call upon it now like so many of us

ruined pride keeps us bobbing at the surface

debt a black rock

what are my abilities and are they in me like diamonds or do i call upon them and have them come to me from some 
other place, the field or the street beside it?

a grocery store on the corner has a picture in the window of marilyn monroe, does that mean i am home

today i did not make a painting

does that i mean i will die tomorrow

i want us all to have success, the best kind and on our own terms

i want to love all the people who are better at everything than i am

if they are good enough to let me

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