Sketch?

This is a poem about why I hate my sketchbook.
Which I am writing this poem in.
This is not a poem about flowers, love, puppies, tacos, death, or war.
Well, maybe war.
Because I have been fighting a personal war against this sketchbook and
all it represents to me
for as long as I can remember.
I hate this sketchbook because it is from the art supply store.

The art store.
What an oxymoronic sacrilege.
I have always hated the art store.
And I sure as hell hated being sent there to buy art school supplies
with money I did not even have for food
in order to attempt
to make art about how much I hate conspicuous consumerism.
So wrong.
So wrong.
So very wrong.

This sketchbook is an atrocity.
Its crisp unmarred black jacket a glossy paper coffin and
its virginal white pages flaunting the supremacy of whiteness.
Its soul-less perfection the total foil
of any aesthetic decision I would ever make.
Its manufactured geometric symmetry
an avatar for the straitjacketed strip-mall retail outlets
it was created in the image of.
A banal and hateful mendacity.
A labotamous runestone set against the mad thinking of sanity
in a world gone wrong.
A logjam in the well of my creativity.
Its perfect pages made of paper
most likely tortured from red earth and brown people.
My sketchbook is like the scarred and stitched body
of an abused and anorexic Brazilian plastic-surgery supermodel trophy wife
in blank bound form.

My best works of art always came
from castoffs.
Recycling the half-used detritus of slothful unfulfilled American shopaholics
into my work.
My sketchbooks as a kid were always salvaged paper
shoved inside floppy dogeared folders found on school floors.
I was always a scrounger
hoarding garbage and refuse
until it began its magical dance of inspired transformation
into something the world had never seen.
An immaculate conception from hallowed dumpsters
that demand no coin and impose no judgments.
Occasionally I stole things
back in the day
which felt mostly justified
although I stopped after they locked me up for a night.

How in the name of God could art come from plastic paint stacked
so neatly
so primly
so presumptuously
on cold metal shelves
tended to by unimaginative republican retirees in polo shirts?
How could Truth emerge from anything sold out by the mall?

I fucking hate this sketchbook.
This perfect plastic volume.
This soul-whore.
It is everything I have ever railed against.
I would that I were desecrating it
but nothing comes to mind that could rectify or redeem its upcharged worthlessness.
So instead
I am just writing in it.