Painters Painting
Everything is to human scale
and you and I are all choreographers of space,
an eerily ambivalent void.
And yes, we worked in various ways,
destroyed various things,
all while you had to have times to feel sorry for yourself.
And no, this has nothing to do with how a picture hits you:
I haven’t done anything in three years
but make things difficult for the critics
and give polite invitations to look somewhere else
besides my portrait of being alive.
Every square inch was equally important
and you used to make sure to leave no trails
but then we erased until we made art
and you’re not here anymore
than how the patterns traveled into the horizon.
I pay heavy money for the art of cheap newspapers,
apprehensive, confrontational with every image.
If I frame my memories of you with my fingers and squint,
I can see how things pushed one another in a pseudo-space
and how there was never a beginning,
just marks scratched into the paper while neither of us looked
until there was a final product that belonged to not you and not me
and we became bystanders in our own relationship.
Secretly I can admit that no one can figure out what I’m doing
but all this time, I’ve just been a work of art
reacting to some other art across the ocean
and it’s not a coincidence that you’re a seven hour plane ride away from me.
The words and phrases cobbled together to form this found poem are credited to the artists interviewed in the documentary “Painters Painting”, directed by Emile de Antonio.