Melanie Page
Tiny Poet Artists
On a blue sky afternoon, I was laying on my back watching white, puffy clouds sift by. I kept looking for turtles or bunnies among the shapes, but only saw words: “trapped,” “neck,” “wet,” and “kiss.” Closing one eye, I pretended the clouds were so small that I could pinch them between my thumb and index finger. Pinch! I wanted them to pop, and the words I could not explain would go away and stop perplexing me. But a cloud stuck to my fingers, a type of cotton candy liable to get me in trouble with god if I stole it. I sat up and looked at the cloud between my digits and read the inscription: “help.” Like a tiny chalk heart for Valentine’s Day, the cloud called out. Shaking my hand, I tried to get the sticky puffs off of my skin, when I heard a tiny screech. Clinging to the cloud for dear life was a little person. She was holding a number two pencil. She was erasing “help” and scribbling “stop.”
“What is wrong, tiny lady?” I asked.
“I was an angel of god, but now I want to be a poet,” she said.
“A tiny poet with a pencil in the clouds?”
“There is no paper in heaven, and no place to write about your dreams,” she said. The tiny poet cried into her hair, and I set her on the grass. An ant snuggled in her cloud, no longer concerned with the busy work of moving food and dirt.
“Tiny poet, what would you write about?”
“Being a man and a woman.” She pulled up her little white gown, but there was nothing between her legs that I could see. “As an angel, I know all about gender relations from watching people kiss. Sometimes they fornicate and make more people. Sometimes one person fornicates with another person who doesn’t want to. ”
“Show me, please?” I asked, “Show me men and women,” and handed the angel an old note that had ripened in my pocket. It was there that she made an image, one with her hair puffed out and curly. She shaded the lips until I knew they were a dark make-up color, and thick. Another series of shading went around the eyelids, and she made the lashes long, pulled and curled. A Marilyn Monroe. She was a real lady. The chest was bare, and two nipples stood out on hard pectorals.
“Woman,” she said, pointing with her pencil, and I nodded, as if I could understand her interpretation. She then drew a second figure, with hair styled back, each comb tooth leaving individual gorges, with a big floppy curl in the front. The tiny poet was an excellent artist, and I wondered why she didn’t want to draw instead of write ridiculous rhyming lines about love, pain, and all the other trite words I heard amateur poets spout at open mic nights, hands shaking so hard that the pages flapped like geese heading south. So far, I had heard nothing poetic come out of her mouth, saw no lead squiggles that resembled a stanza. There was an old woman who visited a zoo. There were so many animals, she didn’t know what to do! Curling smoke slipped out of the cigarette in the figure’s mouth, and the eyes were squinted. A James Dean. He was a real dude. Clothed in a leather coat, the chest was bare, and two nipples stood out on hard pectorals.
“Man,” she said. At a closer glance, I knew the drawings were the same person, and neither was of her. They were Hollywood icons glossed over the same body, as if all people were caricatures of movies, puppets pulled on strings miming life, each other, stereotypes of buffoons and whores and skeletons. She knew nothing about human beings, and I hated her. If she wrote about my world, she would get us all wrong and molest the details. She would be a cracked compact mirror, distorting what she saw through the clouds that were white today, but many times grumbled gray, like a giant’s belly. In existence, these two figures would wear leather without crotches and dog collars, carry whips and feather ticklers. They would spank each other in the privacy of their room, the screams streamlining in stereo to the upstairs and downstairs neighbors, wonder what the fuck is up with those people, one a bank teller and the other a never-ending student. They had pasts with dogs and bills and step-fathers and yearbook pictures, nevertheless yelling, “spank me HARDER, oh PLEASE!”
Picking up the tiny angel, I ripped out her left wing for having humans all wrong. She ran in counter-clockwise circles, until she fell over, impaling herself on her own pencil.