I'm graduating; fluffy red plummage abounds like fluffy red plummage abounding. Yeah.

Anything that has continued for longer than a few weeks, and even that, always seems to gain a foothold, define what life is in some increasingly significant way. People come and go, pairs of pants washed and unwashed (mostly unwashed in college). All around you backdrops get added, character shunted this way and that.

I'm...bewildered. College is my life. It's the mistress whose splayed body showcases my brush strokes, my art dotted with calligraphic kanji interspersed with drops of blood and the occasional beer stain. It's my palace, my den of slatting intellectual lusts. It's home.

You ever get that weird feeling toward the end of a tv show, like you know it's going to end and you begin to wonder what's on next?

I wish I could just turn to something simple, like Mtv or UPN. Surfing along the rim of some fat bastard's satellite dish, running up into the 300's, trying to find that one channel that has something decent on.

She wraps her arms around me. I can feel her breasts pressing into my back, her lips hovering on my ear. I gave her some good years, and knowing how I've treated myself, she's taken a few in turn. I never regretted my convictions or loyalty. I don't know if anything or anyone exists who can accentuate the paint like her, how her body curves and melds that collage.

I'm not afraid...just uncertain. I could go to Japan and teach English, to dozens of places around America to do research..I could even take up bartending like I always wanted to do.

The tech crew rolls out this screen on-stage. I almost want to sit in front of it, just stare at it and let the fluorescent light pour over my hair, let the warmth numb my body. Paint cans. There are paint cans inside my body, my breath a sharp airbrush. It's not word-processing..I need to have a vision inside before I start, something else besides the shadow or the perspective I want.

I look at you sometimes like that. I wonder how the brush feels up against you, the inks caressing your skin and gently cooling in uneven segments; how it feels seeping down into your pores. I have no patterns to share. In your eyes are just my own, hollow cavities acting as the foil to my fingertips. Up and down, in circles, blending, blending some collage I will never see.

And as I leave this place, I can smile with the satisfaction that masterpieces go unrecognized, but felt.

We are all artists. We create the sunlight and pastoral meadows, perhaps dusky cityscapes of a life, always changing, never shown.

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