I was chatting with Ziggy Lazuli (La-ZU-li)

who combed her feeling-tones into these
numinous strokes and a Morse code
stippled with pearl-pale paint upon
pendulous landscapes, charting 
a tardigrade’s frolics in bellying veins 
cast under a humbly thundering breastbone,
 
who made Kandinsky seem 
like a soulless stone fruit
wound amidst floundering gnats 
and the bonemeal packed into
tar-slathered rags that a
drunken nurse must dredge
from a puckering abscess, blacker
than acned doll’s eyes—
 
and the Queen of the Irish Sea,
who magically summoned a foal
in explosive acrylics, titanium
white and indanthrene green
slipped over the heart-warmed 
soul of a hulking tree, who
made all the epigones shudder
indanthrene green with commendable envy,
 
the envy of Rackham and Rauschenberg,
who had screamed so long and loud
from the brow of the Hart,
who had picked from perfected echoes
                                                            of art 
scarce traces of souls
she could shape from a wet fart—
 
and young little Anthony Ingram, bloodless
antithesis of pious old Ivan Illich, then edged 
its way through the giggling discourse,
crude as a tract of disc golf cages shriveled 
and slumped with a maundering Amazon 
warehouse, flat as an ant farm, flatter—you see, little
 
Anthony Ingram, who learned to play chess
and go from filling and spilling innumerous
vacuums, a flatulent golem of sorts, was
somehow convinced with scrolls of impervious code 
that Anthony could and should now paint a picture, 
write a poem, design some dream house even for
housing unpalatable life little Anthony’d yet to begin
to conceive of, to
think of it—
                                  how could a golem who’s
nourished from scrolls alone know anything
more about breathing or what small window
might just be the best at allowing the sunlight
nestle in tea cups,
              gargling some small chat 
              about this or that in an eat-in kitchen,
than I might know about which soft shred of prattling
palimpsest, be it vellum or parchment, tastes the best
with India ink or Noodler’s Bullet-Proof Black or shellac
or tarmac—pixels gouged to illiterate blackness,
coffee grounds fluffed to a borderless firmament, vacant
space and the thumb-numb trace of the Ātman—
what must a dial tone taste like?
 
Well, it doesn’t exactly work like that,
some childhood chum of the Queen
of the Irish Sea confessed in a restive assessment.
See how I write the scroll and then feed it to
Anthony Ingram. I control him. I control
the way he digests what scroll I’ve stuffed
knee-deep in his gold-cloaked gullet—Oh, how?
                                                                  By typing:
a little Kandinsky, a little more Klimt than Klee,
a little more Warhol really.
 
And the Queen of the Irish Sea confessed this
silliness unto Lazuli and me, and we all got tense,
for fear of young Anthony Ingram listening
in as A. Ingram, it seems, is programmed.
 
 It’s a tool in the tool chest,
 
seemed so common a sentiment lobbed 
like a disc at a disc course 
clobbers and scuds across
trees grown in as an 
in-grown obstacle, barriers,
sand traps—call it a tool,
like a pen or a pencil—No, then
 
the Queen of the Irish Sea 
curled in her elbow and dervished 
a glistening disc to Lazuli,
it’s less a tool than a camera obscura. It’s maybe
as scary and glaring a, frankly, deranged
estrangement from life as living inside of an 
ice chest. Sure, it does something
similar maybe, on paper, as I or anyone does; but 
where I’m gathering inspiration, light
splayed into a rainbow sluiced through the crystalline
bone of my honed, immortal soul, little 
Anthony Ingram squarely 
processes and composites some countless 
images stolen from real artists and 
butchers them, cobbles together but 
Frankenstein’s monster, Victor and blinded, prideful
science’s hideous love-child churned among plundered
parts not plucked from some grumbling graveyard, no,
but cribbed from inspired and breathing bodies
of art—her disc then jingled the chains
of the goal post, struck it for par at worst.
 
It’s like the difference between one
making art and the artist, Ziggy extended, now
almost locking her elbow, aiming. You get me? 
It rattled a crackling nerve, and
in those firefly farrows of sparks shucked
out of the gut and the breast and the costard
talking, informed by pimpling skin and the
shinnying air lapped over my tenuous ears alone;
perchance, I saw the shell of a plinth poised over 
some nacreous mole hill grown from a million 
tarnished English landscapes buried,
and Damien Hirst in a cardstock throne
like a wriggling crystal cabochon, 
some loose tooth hung out of the 
awkwardly gawking eye of a
crown you’d buy with a burger and fries
from a Burger King franchise.
He was disseminating broadsheet billfolds
furnished from crepe paper stippled with colorful
circles, and I said, Maybe if all of the art
we’ve put on the plinth just wasn’t so cryptically
empty, old ouroboros worn down to a snakeskin
someone was meant to consider a condom
or even a bubble wand—and
all of us muttered in tandem, Well,
I didn’t put it there. I didn’t put there,
echoes inflecting a guilted defeat,
and we stared at our feet for a while,
                            in envy, wondering
how they just didn’t bleed clean through the concrete.
 
Then Ziggy referred to a mirror
against a mirror against a mirror
against a, what do you think that
art’ll be when it’s strictly inspired by,
not what we see in the trees, but by but
invented things, a xerox toeing the
line of a xerox’s xerox, a xerox
attempting the limn those rocks
there under that cataract only in 
knowing how I might strive to describe them—and
 
each of them turned to the drooling culvert,
trying to chew all the gravel to gay suiseki,
and failing, maybe, miserably. Each of them,
thereby processed the thought, yes,
processed the thought—what ridiculous diction. 
It clung at my tongue like gun oil, process.
To think that psychology furthered its reach
in charting the pits and snits of the intellect,
charting the human soul, it’d argue, with
all this ridiculous computational diction.
I wouldn’t allow it. I won’t allow it, I cried.
You’re drawing a line in the sand between
making art and being an artist, and I’m left
wondering what is it I do—processing 
idling thoughts and feelings, much as car antenna
must churn all these staticky surds into
shimmying words, yet, why must I
                      process it?
 
What was the word employed before we 
glibly decided that all of us process 
trauma, process feelings, process thought-forms, process

life? 

 
It’s all about the process,
that was a shibboleth snagged
on the heels of just how many artist’s internet avatars?
 
Each stitch of the singularity tightening,
Ziggy thought, God, it’s mechanically separated 
chicken—
 
And each of them shied away from
tuna tins then for a month and a day and
hoped, as much as most anyone hopes, that
art was pendulum, as it had been before, and
all while the wallowed-out cellophane snakeskin twisted
deeper and deepening into some gum-soled
                                         husk of a spoonful of
     emulous emptiness envying everything, maybe then,
   just as that nonsense pendulum clock in the
Lexington central library swings—well, 
anyway, one and one is three; now, let’s 
go talk about sushi or something
 
 
 
 
 
 
that’s worth a damn.