Art Stars

Art poems.

Francis Bacon: Study After Flesh.

The body betrays itself.

A blur of meat,

muscle, and bone

beneath the brush.

How often we wanted

the clean edge of a form,

the containment

of skin

pulled tight

over the cage of ribs,

but the face

slips

into a scream.

You said

it was a mirror,

this canvas—

not reflection, but

the raw

insistence

of being.

Who will tell you

the truth?

The room has no corners,

the walls bleed into shadow,

and there,

a body twisted

like memory—

parted lips of a mouth

that never speaks.

In the frame,

it’s always aftermath.

You enter through ruin,

through the stench

of what you thought

was control.

But this is where

you live now,

in the image

of yourself

half-born,

always fleeing

into another version

of fear.

---

Dorothea Tanning: Doors Unseen.

The dream splits open—

a room you’ve never left

but never knew.

Underneath the wallpaper,

the bones of some other life

push through,

fingers caught in the plaster,

flowers with mouths.

This is how it begins,

with a door half-hidden,

leading you deeper

into the fabric of waking.

Not the ordinary hours—

not the clock ticking its familiar pulse—

but the stretch of time

between breath and breath,

where bodies stretch

into shadows,

half-beast, half-girl,

and you follow.

Didn’t you say

it was a game once,

to play with the edges of what you know?

But it’s no longer

the game,

is it?

The soft couch turns hard,

the windows become mouths,

and you

are everywhere

at once.

A woman with wings

leans against the frame.

She waits for you

to ask the question

you’ve never spoken aloud.

How many selves

have you worn,

and how many

have you shed

in the rooms

where the light shifts

just enough

to trick the eye

into seeing

the world you’d forgotten?

---

Helen Frankenthaler: Pouring Light.

It begins with the ground—

the canvas stretching wide

like an open field,

waiting

for the first flood.

Color doesn’t stay still.

It moves

like water,

pooling,

seeping through the fabric,

finding the places

that resist,

then giving way.

There is no line

to hold it back,

no edge

sharp enough to carve

meaning from chaos.

Only the slow

gesture of a hand

releasing

what the mind

cannot contain.

You said it was a choice

to trust the spill,

to let the body follow

where the color wants to go.

And now, it runs

toward something larger—

light spilling

into more light,

blues folding into ochre

like a memory

you can’t name.

How long

will you stand there,

watching as the world

remakes itself

on the surface

you once called empty?

There’s no turning back now.

You’ve poured yourself

into the space between

what is and what might be,

letting it soak through

until the boundaries blur

and all that remains

is a horizon of color,

unfixed,

and full of breath.