I painted this acrylic ink piece based on Jim Perucci's poem entitled "Submission/Admission/Confession." He's an English major here at the University of Hartford, but I've never met him. The assignment was to take the poem or story we were given and create an illustration to go along with it. The poem mentioned witches being hanged, their bodies snapping up like rag dolls, and the narrator smoking a cigarette, and I combined these images into a single illustration. I ended up buying Raggedy Anne dolls, hanging them with twine, and putting cigarettes in their mouths. Then I basically just worked from the photo I took of this.
5" x 10"
46 hours
spring 2006

Submission/Admission/Confession by Jim Perucci

These are the calls from home, the only calls
The solace imploding with a dial tone anxiety
This is the love not calling
The rust carried away by the wind
The noose, witch and the moll
The Salem mistress, oh I adore
The mayor and landlord tying knots
And rag dolls snapping upward
Feet swaying, body pivoting on the throat
This hand rolled cigarette wasting to its end
Pinched between chipped incisors
Smoke and breath indiscernible
Seeping between the fractures of yellow bones
Hanging in a bloody lip cracking grin
On a sickening blue mist metallic November morning
These are the empty prescriptions
The orange empty bottles
Capless and rolling under the bed
Abandoned emota-automechanica solutions
Gathered in the cheeks and chewed
Crack my skull and dump it in
Just like coffee grounds
This is being useless without a hit of speed
Unable to think
And think you're worth a damn
This is having a kidney with calluses
This is the home of the failure
The defeated loser
Placed on the rack for rent
This is the non-matching furniture
This is the cold
And a hard drink for every biting nerve in my boots
These are the times of the float
From check to check
The things I own, I wear
A sleeping 1979 Puch Maxi Sport MKII
In European lime green that glistens in the frost
Thin leather gloves drunken the fingers
Vintage Soviet helmet over a Russian Ushanka, a gift
Steel toed boots that hide one white sock, one black sock
This is the time for work, respectable employment
These are the black cats and black sheep
Lost in retreat like prisoners of war
Like the Germans at Stalingrad
This absence of good ideas
This absence of justice
And the disappearance of the gutter punk