Art Gallery Outlet

Let's workshop a poem underscoring the flip-side of etiquette rules, there at their very origin: that, however much they are claimed to keep us safe and civil, they serve as pretenses to lash out

Art Gallery Outlet 

Visible becomes our vexation at the guard 
on duty at the art gallery. He is here, paid,
to be as present, as given, as the exit signs
and the fire extinguishers. As here as such 
a guard ought to be, he ought not to (be)
count(ed) as (among the) present. And yet
this one, cornrowed, texts on his cellphone, 
the teeth of his held-back chuckles in its glow.

Yes, like the guard (who even eyes our art 
instead of his nothing-in-particular), we fail
to fade into the background as well. This one
with the breath of a Whopper. Over there 
a war vet hugged by teary strangers. And here 
two aged women hand in hand, between them
a black child with a gift-shop bear too big 
for it to keep from bumping everyone.  

Why not just count the guard as one of us,
in this case? Surely there is room for one more
dazed tourist, phones out as well, unexpected 
to fade. But then upon whom would we direct
our aggression—ever already at a slow simmer
as fauna with needs of sugar, caffeine, seats,
while on a ride on which we did not ask to be
and that ends only through a grave tunnel?

Etiquette rules are pretenses for purgations
and the guard, paid, is not well-mannered. 
One cannot go after the child or its mothers
in the north. So who better than him to serve
our aggression—ever already at least on low 
and now bubbling from having long stood, feet
shifting in bafflement—before such obscurities
we paid, paid so much to his museum, to see?

This poem is unpublished

Painting: Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490-1510)