I AM (K)OROT (explicit)

[HopeVictoria56]

I AM (K)OROT

I am Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot,
or rather his son--
the son he’s ashamed of;
the son he keeps hidden in his attic,
along with all of his failed discarded paintings.

I sleep on knotted wooden floors.
Once his studio, almost every inch been christened with encrusted paint.
Sometimes I wonder through the dense forest of covered, dusty furniture
and squares of lush, half-realized woodland I can never enter.
Other times I just sit and stare.

Since my abandonment, I too have taken up the brush.
It fills my days and nights,
and gives me dreams of vengeance even lusher than his most overgrown Arcadia.
Will he find them,
after I am long gone
and my atoms have dispersed between the floorboards
and onto the dinner table below,
sprinkling their heads during their after-church Sunday feast?
Sitting there so pious, 
it will beckon him upstairs.

When he pushes aside the forest he left for me:
his shimming paintings;
the swirling floral patterned armchair…
stained;
and finally the golden mirror, sculpted with gazing cherubs…
catching a quick glance of his reflection
and the jarring repulsion of his pockmarked face,
he will stumble INTO them. (caps not necessary for emphasis.)

He did not want them,
so I painted over them.
I “completed” them, (I don't think the quotations are needed.  The poem itself describes the completion of the paintings.)
as he sought to complete nature—
for he did not want to complete me.

His once swaying trees
halted
CRYSTALIZED. (I dont think the caps are needed for impact.  I think just the one word line does the job.)
The very air that they breathed, so full
and so healing,
Now an atmosphere of thick gel.
Of Venus.
Some parts so thin,
like the moon. (like what surrounds the moon.  OR some line describing the air on the moon because the moon itself is not thin.)
The yellow-oranges and orange-yellows
pushed to sick heavy yellows and blasphemous reds.
His grays were gray.

The cooling blues... gone too,
and so were the nymphs and satyrs who drank from them.
Now boys
The kind he sought to escape
and lied to himself for
that he did not need them…
didn’t need their rules,
(broken as they were)
and their sticks
sharp and blinding
ripping each other apart
into a colorful, drunken, obscene, decayed, sweaty, incandescent orgy--
calling to mind that day when the demons finally broke through the rocky ceiling of the Underworld
and pissed in all the rivers,
burning the Elysian fields to ashes,
and raping every zombie in the fields of Asphodel,
and filling Tartarus to the brim with shit.

I like this stanza in the way that it is so nasty because it describes in more detail the vengeful nature in which the character finished the paintings.

Blank his stare
Anger forcing his fists together, clinching… strangling…
something...
knelling down,
his bony knees on knotted wood, (You have used the word "knotted" to describe the floor already.  Maybe use a different word?)
he will breathe deeply all of my decayed, scattered atoms--
the ones left in the floorboards,
only to arise
and calmly readjust his evening jacket
only to stepped lightly back down the stairs
and resumed his dinner.

Will I change him? Could I?
Yes. Extra gravy on his mashed potatoes,
before returning that night.  

I think the deeper meaning in the poem is one that seems to be age old.  The story about a man who cannot come to terms and accept parts of himself (his artistic nature, possibly his homosexuality?), so he hides them away and pretends they do not exist.  The man has a son who mirrors those qualities back to him.  The man does not know how to love his son because he does not love those parts of himself, so he also pretends that his son does not exist.  In this story, the son attempts to bring to life those qualities by finishing his father's discarded artwork in a vengeful manner and, in a way, forcing his father to come face to face with his own demons that have prevented a loving father/son relationship.  I do like this poem and find it to be a very creatively visual story.  I also could be wrong about the homosexuality, but S7 had me wondering.