The Artist Won’t Be Mounted

:The Artist won’t be mounted
acquiring her birthright to aerial perspective by way of self-flaggellation and somber
magnanimity, having served her softness to the masses in exchange for that immortality
Achilles lusted after

Straddled in the orifice beneath her womb, we photosynthesize beneath its heat, our sun.
Yet her robust facade betrays the pallid visage within, mourning a perceived
barrenness, the line to her fertility severed in her ascent. She’s forgotten how
to get it down on the page while the spirit is still green and soil-crusted,
she cannot feel how the toddlers hit
the crosswalk on the offbeat,
it has slipped her tongue that a cake’s heyday precedes the eggs

The Artist is busy hailing a compliment she can climb in back of and ride
into the silver screen. Then she’ll have the neck of the world between her legs.
The people will look like whims from up there. She’ll squeeze ‘em until the spontaneity oozes out, leaving shells of desire washed up on the shores of her beaches.

Her only atonement is the plaster embedded beneath her fingernails and the smudged pen ink
dragged across a ruled notebook — she’s been doing them like a proper left-handed heathen.
Exactly so, her fate was determined at her inception, always knew she would have to nail her life
into submission. At the behest of her new age manifesto: The Artist refuses
1) to be pinned, 2) to be probed, 3) to be had.

Coda:
The Artist dwells only among others of her kind. Each situated upon a lifeless
perch from which they can’t bring themselves down, addressing each other in nods passed
from across the gallery.