Art School -- could boost or bugger you

Art School my Eden
playground after sixth form
wild, chaotic, spin drum of a place,
mangler of a self still waiting to be formed
in which I lost my innocence.
No longer one
to fit himself into the world, now out
to recreate the world
in my own image. God-play. Hard dice
beyond what I'd thought possible.

This was a world where I was in control.
What was impossible before
was manifest.
There had to be a catch - I'd long been warned:
forbidden fruit somewhere about!
And there it was...
The life class with its one constraint
the only stricture I could find
in the whole place:
THOU SHALT NOT TOUCH!

All else was laissez-faire
but this was not a Biblical encountering,
here were no stirrings
of the flesh, we wanted only
a forensic scrutiny
to take the world apart, to find
the building blocks, the forms
that crop up everywhere. We were
no more than cooks; the world a meal
gone slightly wrong and we would rescue it.