What a relief, I have submitted my assignment

I have been working on this ever since Monday. I could have written reams. The more I wrote and then had to cut dramatically, the more individual words started dancing around in front of me saying 'look at me, explore all my meanings'. The shortest words started to need long paragraphs.

Even the title was a hurdle. First I had a really creative one. Then I decided that anyone given my title to review would give up on the spot. It didn't have words, just symbols. Oh well, I enjoyed typing it out, even if I then deleted it.

The poem was by Frank O'Hara

Why I Am Not a Painter 

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

Now I'd like to look at the actual painting and the actual series of 12 poems.