Definition of art: Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it. (Robert Rauschenberg)

Take an object.

Do something to it.
Do something to it.
Leave yourself out of it.
Leave everyone out of it.

Take a manmade object.
Make it an animal.
Take an animal.
Make it a God.

Make something inanimate a God.
Just don’t use language
as a crutch.  Stay on message:
it’s God and no human
is of concern to it.

Spooning?  Leave it.
You don’t know the spoon well enough
to borrow its name.  Drop and give the spoon
twenty thousand words:  enough then, maybe,
if the spoon says so.  If it speaks somehow.

Stay on message.  God
is not a human concern.  Do
something to it.  Do something
to it.  Leave.

Do something
to yourself.  To yourself.
Then leave.  You are of no
human concern.  Art is the doing
of things to objects.  Not a
spin cycle goes by
when I don’t remember that —
put paint on the canvas, the teapots,
the broken parts of me, the do something
else to it: remove it.  Start at
washing.  That’s an art, eh?  A tough one.
You suck at it.

Take an object.
Do something.
Anything.  Do something except
blurt about your whiny puke of a life.
Do something to it instead:
leave.

on every street where there’s a poetry reading
there is a sidewalk

and on it the rich folks stroll, the middle class folks 
hurry, and behind the windows the poor folks 

stand behind counters, behind bars,
behind the scenes,

and everyone looks a little bit lost,
a little bit scared, a little in a fog.

but in every reading everyone changes —
there are just poets there and people thinking about poetry 

so is it any wonder that in there we love
our detailed narratives and our persona poems

and our big broad stories told loud?  stepping outside —
bah, who wants to do that?  who among us here

in the warm hug of the poetry reading
ever wants to go back onto the sidewalk

with the rest of the foggy scared
lost rich poor middle class people?