by Brian Kerstetter

 

 

O. MAKES STUFF

 

O. gets bored easily.

So you give him a pencil and paper

and tell him to take a big boat to england

and draw something funny on the high seas.

Because he’s a show-off, he flies back first-class

and marches into the big white gallery, climbs up a ladder,

and like a googling 21st century caveman,

scribbles his H-U-G-E stick-figure drawings on the walls,

     … a figure thinking ME … ME … ME

in his empty watermelon head,

     … a man saying BLAH  BLAH  BLAH

around the clock.

Then he climbs down the ladder, scratches his thumb cuticle,

and thinks about 3 things:

MONEY.  SEX.  EATING AN APPLE.

Such dirty drawings, you slap his face,

take the pencil, and send him outside with a camera.

He marches back with yellow paint on his knuckles

and nails his photos to the black walls in a black room.

     …two girls painted black, shot with yellow, blue, red

green PAINT BALLS – strange psychedelic leopards.

     …a naked girl painted black lying on her side

with lines of colored paint dripping across her body –

a human rainbow zebra.

     …a black angel smearing her yellow, green,

blue, and red powdered wings against the black wall behind her.

     …four blackened faces, eyes closed,

with red, yellow and green paint circles around the mouth

and eyes – confused human traffic lights at night.

Such messy photos, you slap his face,

take the camera, and send him into the forest

with a hammer and a nail.

He trundles back, his arms full of branches,

and builds stick structures of pointless roller coasters

and a black question mark dangling from a hangman’s noose.

There’s a line of miniature wooden animals marching off a cliff, too.

You throw up your hands

and give up.

The last thing you see before you slap him

and leave smiling…

a large wall drawing of a man

with the word YES balanced on his erection.