A GODLIKE WHIMSY

MY POEM TODAY was prompted by my envy of an artist who can work under any pressure---the street artist. Not the graffiti artist. The one who works on a painting for under 20 minutes and sell it, too. Met one at the Strip in Las Vegas. We chatted while he painted furiously. I bought his painting.



A GODLIKE WHIMSY

A graffiti artist? No, sir, I use spray cans not brushes. I paint. ---Las Vegas Street Artist

Is it any different, this splashing of colour
Behind a glass cage, from the wild abandon
Of defacing, disfiguring all walls and fences
That come between you and your pure anger
Cursing a dark and ugly hole you call home
In a jungle where tendrils are skyscrapers
And black trellises of filthy woven grid wires
Swollen like hissing, smugly snaking, serpents
Slithering swiftly after swallowing whores
Snagged and stoned inside gaols of penury,
A condition not of their making but of a city
Beyond repair, cursed, now beyond rebuke.
Where you would have been a midnight
Rogue spraying mangled rants of hate
On defenceless palace walls and mansions
Fenced off with forbiddingly harsh barricades
Of vulgar wealth and embarrassing splendor,
You chose a prison of art, a cage of glass,
Where you would rather spray raw beauty
On surfaces that scarcely know a raison d’etre
Of creating and spreading beauty now gone
where it ought to be, a quixotic task you share
With a craftsman in the sky who might just
Be smiling down on you in gleeful whimsy,
Because you, in utter smallness or madness,
Would rather shape beauty and be godlike.



---ALBERT B. CASUGA