I could stare at it for hours and have already.
The flowers bang their heads against the glass,
or would, if there were glass. The foreground, then.
Flat and flush with it, their little heads
(you condescend) could use a bit of forced
perspective, some fresh angle on their brash
predicament. They’re having none of it.
Baboons, these blooms press livid noses up
against the one-way wall of their enclosure,
pulling painted faces in the mirror
that is not a mirror, pleading, poking
fun at you and everything you do.
Yar boo. Stop looking at your boring laptop.
Life is happening but not to you.
(I mean I whenever I say you.)
They want to get away, lurch upward, yanked
back. Cruelly tethered by the stems –
snuffed fuses, forced into the same three shades
of thoughtless green as the jug that is their jailor,
whose grim striations of unbending white
try, like a film star’s Hamlet, to convey
depth and reflection, but misjudge the measure.
Those flowers though! Every one a treasure.
(Hearing somebody describe a painting
is second-hand voyeurism – and dull
as most accounts of dreams, unless they’re bad dreams.
The same get-out applies to this bad painting.)
Flowers! Sixteen, I counted them, all fat
as beach balloons. Four exactly match
the neon dildo pink and dayglo orange
of the table – if it is a table –
that madly strobes beneath the jug. I love it,
though not enough to pay nine hundred quid
to take it home. I pray that no one does,
that it endures forever on the wall
of the cafe of my local swimming pool
where I’ve grown to like the faintly chloric coffee,
and greets me every morning with the same
puppyish, berserk enthusiasm
between its frowning guards, two tall cold windows,
through which, if it could crane its neck, and had
a neck to crane (I’m glad it doesn’t), the painting
might see flowers – real ones – tunnelling
out of February, like a rebuke,
calling it a joke, and wrongly. This ugly,
glorious thing has what the real ones can’t have:
intention. Someone wanted every stroke.
Acrylic, indefatigably alive,
it is the lunatic in each of us
who looks at life and thinks I’ll have a go
and do it better, or different, which means the same.
Better than life! All art is better than life!
And is it! Cannot not be, being wrung
from life at its richest – o seething, pointless joy
of making for no reason a mistake
and finding someone who will love it, or like it
enough to think that someone else will like it,
and stick it up where we can see it, see it
and hate it, for the first eighteen or twenty
cups of coffee, till it’s family
and sacred. Centuries or coffees. If then
we mock it, call it ugly in a book
that someone else will read and will not like
and someone would have liked but will not read
(you mean I whenever you say we)
whatever we might say behind its back
we’d die defending it from any twat
who’d breathe a word to make the thing feel small.
Life and better than life! Clumsy and artificial!
May it outlive us all.