Holes in shoes showing socks a reminder of impecunious days
You were pissed off back then stuck it seemed in nothing but
Shitty commercial art jobs that just barely paid the bills
A series of one-night stands with commerce not a marriage
Drawing shoes until you could cop a better gig doing your art
It's trippy to think of how well it has worked out for you
Maybe the shoes were portentous of success and not of defeat
For awhile you thought to emend those shoes from your story
But then you decided to wear these cut-up shoes like a caterwaul
To draw attention to your feet and damn the veracity
[Note: Written as a continuation of an exercise introduced at a workshop called "High Art/Low Language: Experiments in Poetic Style," conducted by Eileen G'Sell at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, where Elizabeth Peyton's exhibition "Ghost" had been on display.
Participants in the workshop viewed the exhibit and picked two images to write poems about, choosing from five "high culture" and five "low culture" words that they had drawn from a hat. For this exercise, I used all of the words in the order I wrote them in my notebook.
I couldn't find an on-line image of Peyton's "Andy's Shoes (After Avendon)" so I used Avendon's original phototograph.]
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