They keep the art from escaping
Tapping their billy clubs
In case of a fight
Between the beautiful patrons
And the wolf-whistling art.
Big hands reach out as if to help you
But it’s only to keep you from touching
What you feel you need to touch.
They turn their lips to your ears
With reconnaissance walkie-talkies in their hands
But it’s not to explain, only to ask you to shut up.
They stand in front of curtains,
Daring you to go inside,
For you know they will monitor
Every pompous out-of-your-ass statement
Concerning the defenseless on the official walls.
You are theirs
In there.
They come in a variety of poses:
The wrestler, the backhanded priest,
The praying mantis,
And they come with a repertoire of moves:
The spear to keep you from climbing near
The computer parts covered in goo;
The wag so you won’t have to try to go up
The bare plywood stairs to nowhere;
The block to keep you from catching a glimpse
Of Leonard Peltier’s horses in snow.
Their job is to protect what they despise
And despise what they might wish to protect.
Jackson Pollock despite his size could never cut it
As one of them,
The constricting yin to the art’s freeing yang,
The enforcers of taste
For “militant nostalgia,” “palimpsestic billboards,”
“radically unpretentious epics of everyday lives and their unsated
appetites”
(Applied to poetry randomly generated out of in-box spam).
They make sure that you don’t love or hate
Anything placed so precariously in this space,
Instead to just do your time, and be whisked away
To the land promised one room beyond,
Only to find at the end their kind hands
Open at the radioactive exit sign.
