Paint
(a prose poem, best read aloud)

Things happen for no reason, like the day you are listening to a thousand women talking about drowning and falling and all of a sudden a well opens inside your head and a few drops of paint trickle out and down into your veins like the pink and blue rubber of a dissection's webbed vessels.  The trickle becomes a flow, slow but portentous--at that moment you know what a wall feels like under the brush, as the paint smooths over your inner edges, a latex layer, blunting you from the air.  You are silent, staring, looking vacant at walls feeling like a wall and trying to remember what you are made of underneath that thick, unbreathable paint--wanting to be smooth and wanting more to be rough, trying to feel out your grain and wondering if this kind of paint has already seeped into your pores and bound itself up with your nature.  You fear if they scrape away this layer they will take too much of you with it, you fear you may well up inside with a second coat...

        you fear and are beginning to feel you are already like an onion wearing so many layers of which you have no memory and took no notice--until now, when you first felt that trickle inside and out--you felt it!--and found a craving for the center which can keep you awake late, peeling and peeling back, peering through the years for an earlier feeling, of air, your soul rough, laid bare.  Now you are crying for no reason, now your are angry without reason, you are angry you are angry you are crying, you are feeling like nesting dolls and each doll is making up reasons for your anger, their painted eyes drying, justifying, doing just fine, doing just fine.

back to Departure: Original Poems by Kelly Vaughan

by Kelly Vaughan
Sept. 2000