Hard Brush Soft Paint
by David Hallilday
Hard Brush Soft Paint
Published by David Halliday at Smashwords
Copyright 2010 David Halliday
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I Am A Landscape Painter
My face is gone. Senses bared like skin pulled back over a face by a coroner. Etherized on a table. I can hear the piano keys playing without fingers. The tenor’s voice has no mouth. I can smell cancer on her clothes. The smooth touch of time between her legs. Taste the liquor of God in the sky. I have lobotomized the education system from every hemisphere. Taken my censors out on the town and gotten them hammered. My wiring is in chaos. The owl is not in the sky; the sky is in the owl. The artist does not stand aloof from his work but steps into the canvas and tries to paint his way out. I paint nothing on the canvas until it is there. The world does not exist; it appears
I Wanted To Go To Vancouver
Her beauty was pornographic. She used it to become famous. I wanted to go to Vancouver and stretch her pain like canvas, stir my brush through her bush. I was young and ambitious and wanted to go the edge of this country and ride the wide suicide of her verse. I think it was the Bardot pout of her lips that made you want to spill paint across her mouth. Or maybe it was the long brown hair falling over her eyes in an ad for seduction poetry that made you want to sketch her naked in the penitentiary of your imagination or take her out into a back alley and punch her lights out
A Woman In The Middle Of A Crowd
A woman in her mid 40s waits in the middle of a crowd, surrounded by the backs of men’s dreams. She waits near a clock that drips. Run out of cuteness. Suffering the lack of temptation. Wallpaper peels off the button down suits of old lovers that hang in her closet. And she mixes up their laughs and their wallets. And remembers only the swollen knuckles and their politeness as they dissolve in her photo albums. She pats the couch. What happened to Fuzzy? Where did she go? Her loneliness is filled with goodness. And her emptiness echoes like a cathedral. Curling a string of pearls around her finger she bites down on her lip. If only I had been prettier.
Farting Rainbows
The artist lives through his body. Sweats paint. Pisses in hues. Farts rainbows. His semen is squeezed out of him like oil from a tube. He is as afraid of the white of the canvas as a child is afraid of the dark. The brush is a lie. Every stroke like slapping his wife. He feels himself retreating into the same old bag of tricks. He feels like an actor pushing his latest film on the Letterman Show. And the gallery owners expect him to pontificate. And the accountants expect to invest. And the women on their knees. And the critics looking for ecumenical insights. Everyone wants to talk about sensitivity and insight and the position of the artist on the cultural scene. The painter feels like another piece of work ready to be hung in a gallery. Or from a cross beam in the attic.