Magnum Opus

I hate writing with a watch.
I can hear the
click
click
click
of my pen
unloading more and more rocks
into the stonewall
echoed by the
tick
tick
tick
of the seconds hand,
my sweat-soaked face surrounded.
All I can hear is the echo of
click
and
tick
and
“Oh look, she's trying to write again!
How precious!”
All I can fear is not being taken seriously,
being patted on the head
like my best friend's Shih-tzu
and being asked to do yet another
play on words.
They whisper behind knuckle sandwiches
“you don't know the meaning of fright”
but every night, when I stick Post-It notes
to the wall to remind myself
come daylight of all of the thoughts
I wish I knew how to say,
right then
is when I hear
“you're not doing it properly”
and
“you'll never be a classic”.
I never asked you to poke holes
in my hot air balloon
with your swords made
of hour hands and minute hands
and hands raised over
gum-smacking
Lipsmackers
“I don't get it”.
You're not supposed to get it,
you diaphanous whore,
you're supposed to hear it,
you're supposed to breathe it
into your ungrateful lungs
like secondhand smoke
spat out the mouth of a
too cool for school chimney boy
those were the days.
The haze of puberty and public opinion
clicked photos at Prom
where the out-of-focus goth girl
became Prom Queen as a prank,
where she held up her razorblade-kissed wrists
and hissed into the microphone,
“this is for all of the people
hiding behind the punch bowl,
deciding that life is best made whole
by words spat into a journal
and not saliva into drunken metal brackets
corralling crooked teeth with school color bands;
for all of the girls who want to dance
side to side, not up and down.”
This poem is for all of the goth girls
who married the quarterback,
who had a child that grew up to be a
theater geek,
who came to every performance
to hear their sweet little dear
swallow Mommy's stage fright
and step out into Daddy's spotlight,
have the balls to stand center-stage
when the playbill read
“Midsummer Night's Dream”
and say “Fuck Shakespeare,
tonight you listen to my magnum opus -
my life is a masterpiece
that I will paint on the inside of your
forearm,
where the skin is soft and supple,
and carve meaning out where
you've never seen it before.”
We fight to keep arts programs in schools,
but how many original works
seep into the woodwork?
Would it work to say that we must
foster creativity,
to praise the activity of intellectual addition,
not subtraction?
Every action has a reaction so tonight,
as I stain my forearms with black ink meaning,
I want to know if in ten, twenty, one hundred years,
if anyone will be reading my mind.