This large square ceiling hanging above my body
is a blank canvass that needs to be painted
with bold strokes and bright colors,
with smooth orange and ocean blue,
rapid pummeling rhythms dictating tone and mood.

I have a pen in my hand that squirts out black bird ink,
but to me it’s a stone sculpting tool that carves deep inside my imagination,
and scoops up newborn thoughts before they disintegrate
when I wake up from my daydream.

So I climb on top of a cocktail chair with malleable
aluminum legs and I attempt to shape the dry whiteness
into something colorful and beautiful.

I want to create beauty because I don’t enjoy surfing the channels of Comcast digital entertainment
having to paddle through the brainwashing
and the ******* and seaweed that washes up
on my hometown shore.

The waves are all the same across the television screen, I am desensitized and numb to the upper class Anglo-Saxons,
who mind-****** my favorite poets and Hip Hop musicians in the mouth, so that they cannot speak with

honesty
and
compassion.

I don’t wonder anymore why some prominent media-figures choke on the microphone; it’s because they have been force-fed
chicken-****
and injected with
snake venom.

That’s why I don’t take all my time of leisure resting back on a tan cushioned boogie-board, riding a cable channel that will not take me anywhere except for an escape from the loneliness of living alone, away from close family and good friends.

That’s why I prefer to sit below a yellow and red pinwheel umbrella and stretch my toes in the wet sand, I don’t even need a beach towel to lie on, and sometimes I just want to sink into the grainy sand
and
forget about time,
forget about love,
and
forget about my reason for being here.

But back to molding a new form of living; that top white wall takes up the majority of my apartment and I think it deserves to be drawn on, painted on, spread with posters of voluptuous artists and cool brooding actors.

A canvass needs to have flesh, just as a skeleton needs meat and skin. I stack my sandy tan sofa cushions one after the other on top of the cocktail chair and I reach up to brush long and wide strokes of bravery and euphoria.

The bristle-tips flicked up specks of green apple paint and sunk deep blotches of red heart into the ceiling.

I danced on top of the spongy sofa seats while they swayed to and fro, but I didn’t think of falling down, what is the point of thinking about

failure?

That will only impede progress and I’m not merely trying to fabricate an illusion to drape myself with a safety cloak. I wish I could have pranced and jumped on the wavering cushion tower,
but instead I begun to grow a look of seriousness and submerged myself into a pool of
focus
and
concentration.

Nonsensical imagery floated adrift from my mind and the energy pounced onto my fingertips and I started to write and draw, and draw and write. I popped a small remote from my pocket and made the stereo sing opera, followed by jazz, followed by something bluesy.

Those songs carried me into this calming state where nothing mattered except for the now kaleidoscopic landscapes and the spacemen with hypnotic eyes. I wasn’t jacked up on Columbian coffee beans, diet coca-cola caffeine, nor psychedelic highs and lows, I was just going with the current baby.

When the canoe is in in the river and you’re rowing with a chipped paddle and without a life-vest, don’t even try to make an adjustment when the water gets rocky and the water pushes you around like an elementary-school ***** bully.

You keep paddling and you don’t throw a rope onto a branch and feel the scene; go with the flow and travel down-stream,
because where you came from is long gone and there’s no point in wallowing and pleasuring yourself late at

night just

to feel better about your ****** life.

But, I don’t even want to think when I’m in an artsy mood, I just want peace, and if peace won’t come to my doorstep and will not call me back when I left five messages, then **** peace,
I’ll settle for a shot of cheap ***** and a scrunched-up cig.
I stop drawing and painting and writing
for a while and take a nice long gaze
at my chaotic collage and smile until the jester frowns.

In huge messy cursive were the words, “LOVE YOURSELF, DO NOT SHOW YOUR EMOTIONS AT A WHIM.”

I was now beginning to struggle to smile. This wasn’t easy to be so straight with yourself, I’m used to bending my back in the wrong way

                 and not accomplishing anything in the process.