SONGWRITER'S STYLE AS PAINTER'S STYLE

Poem by Jenny Scoones.

If a poet is a painter and a painter writes songs

Then who am I?

If a chord is a colour and a colour is a word

Then who am I?

Synaesthesia dreaming – I like boys

With thin wrists, and hair that gathers

In curls.

I like boys thin framed like I like paintings

Thin framed, like I like songs, stripped bare,

Like I like words.

But words are frivolity and boys make things hurt

And the boys that I like want.

The boys that I like want other boys, and the girls

That I like, they want me. And the people that I like aren’t always boys or

Ever girls, and I take up smoking, and I wear crisp white shirts.

I wonder, how is it sound can make me feel?

I wonder, how a painter finds his voice?

In the space you leave behind there is

The hollow of not-feeling. Of the moment been and gone;

The electric sensation, the longing, then

I miss you I miss you, whoever you are

Little boy, big girl, small person I need you

I need to be alone now. I think.

Though to think is too much. Too much to think

That a colour is a sound.

I think in melodies and then I question what I think,

What it is to think, and how that sounds,

And is a melody my own and can I please hold it in my arms?

Melody, do I catch you, or do I set you free?

Is what I have a gift, this cock between my thighs,

this brain forever whirring, this ability of mine –

To weave words into music and music into colours;

Make light and make sound, make everything ring;

A poem into a painting into a song.

Whose melody is mine, is it my

Own, or did I borrow it? Am I merely trying it on for size?

Will it fit, will it not? Is it growing, have I shrunk?

And will it change?

Will it change like my clothes did, when I was five, when I was fifteen, did when I was twenty,

Will it change like my clothes do every day? Will it, like my clothes, shrink?

Could I find you, in a melody

Would I recognise your face?

And could you hear me in the colour

You say is mine?

Sometimes I want breasts;

Nipple between my teeth like gristle.

I always want breasts but only sometimes are they not my own.

I am changing and I want. But what I want I do not know.

Everyone always working, working, me, thinking too much.

Doesn’t it terrify you that three notes makes a colour?

Doesn’t it terrify you that three words make a sound?

And that a line on a page sings in my brain

And tells me in words how to feel?

I make sounds until I make songs.

I make words until I make sense.

I make shapes until I make a picture.

I make a picture and I have written a song