I’m cracked open and all I have are the cool rooms 
of museums, one altar after another after another, 
strange alchemies and rituals and manifestos in paint.

Griefs made words useless, so I drank from the oasis of color. 
I’m free to be invisible, a novitiate trembling in exaltation, 
in love and inept. Oblivion can be dark but placid, 
can be blue but green. I rounded the gallery’s hallways 
to traces of rich ladies in jeweled, dappled 
amber, to their invariably opalescent white skin, and beneath 
the canvas, a craving vocation brought me into my hands, 
my limbs, outside of the sad box of words I had 
carelessly poured into everything I had.