Another Failure of Art

I cannot paint; I cannot draw, sculpt or mould:
My hands are dumb to the lines, shades, and forms.
There’s little sublime in my visual
Interpretations of the world.
I cannot translate the mind to canvas.
I cannot show, but I can dictate,
Determine your internal sight.
I can make you see anything you want;
Or, anything you don’t.
From the minute to the cosmic,
My words will guide this picture show:
Landscapes, cityscapes, the mundane, the splendour,
The horror, fragments, impressions,
All vivid, all unavoidable
Once I have pulled the switch.

First: A colony, first miniscule, but with rapid growth,
Thrives in the soil, divided into a thousand
Individual dots, each splitting,
Splitting, splitting, expanding
The civilization exponentially,
Until finally six billion individual dots
Collude to create the illusion
Of a light blue sphere
No larger than a dime.

Then, look: a stone park bench,
Inundated with moss among the pillars,
Rolling autumn foliage spirals beneath,
And there below the granite underbelly
A pair of hand prints, one large, one dainty,
Frozen in the concrete base, perhaps,
Left on a whimsical summer afternoon
By a father and son tandem?

Finally: Through the haze of a rainy night,
A spectre of yourself reflects in the train window,
But through it, with deliberate focus,
You can see faint signs of a vanishing city
Jutting up from the earth, like jagged teeth,
And you know, somewhere through the fog,
Nine stories up, she sleeps.

My hands are dumb to the lines, shades and forms,
But I never run out of images to paint.

A Return of Sorts

Upon Holding a Notebook Again

I bought a leather-bound notebook,
Much too impressive
For what I had planned for it,
And carried it down King Street.
As its power began to take hold,
The images flashed,
Flipped through my mind
Like a rabid, demonic sketchbook
Until, as it had once been,
My second vision began to consume
The material realm:
I have been away from myself
For far too long.
I found a coffee shop, a cliché,
As the notebook returned
My essence: The Obligation.
I stood, pen in hand,
A rough, bearded beast,
Slouching towards Byzantium.