Gallery painting

“You don’t love her, you only love the frame you've trapped her inr”
was one of his favorite thoughts
love to him after all
Was walking aimlessly through an art gallery

Starting off patient and curious, taking his time
reading every letter of every placard, every date and contemporary
studying every brush stroke and finally,
annihilated by beautiful simplicity,
forgetting himself

But the annihilation was always short-lived
And the second climax, after the first, was no climax at all
Each canvas being of such an unattainable standard,
For how could they not be? Hanging there so composed and self-assured
How could you hang so without once being thought
worthy of preservation, of a golden frame
A true masterpiece

But like the prodigies that created them,
the manicured hands that waved down the
Trains to the sandstone art academy;
five-pronged tools of Providence
falling to Earth in order that the rest may taste
Ambrosia with their eyes
Will all inevitably discover on their arrival
so many others of their kind
So too could individual paintings when placed
side by side, arouse my sentiments
The way a building in lower manhattan might
Strike me as tall

And finally, with aching feet,
with blurred eyes and frantic
cursory glances he realised for the first and hundredth time
That each was beautiful in its own unique way
which was to say that all were in the same way
trite

And the rest of the gallery,
All the rooms he had not yet visited
Now only interested him
Because they were just that,
rooms he had not yet visited

Boutique Hotel

J. was walking up to his room from the party, drunk and with little command of his legs and arms. In the poorly lit hallway he exhibited his drunkenness, colliding with doors and making exaggerated movements in the hope that he would come face to face with a person from his youth and be forced to explain himself. He pressed the button for the elevator and waited for what seemed like minutes, but if he was impatient he concealed it well. “Why should I be in such a hurry?”, he asked himself, not dismissively, but as if to construct a table in his mind of all the things that could possibly cause someone to make an enemy of an elevator. When the doors finally opened with a dissonant screech, he remembered that his room was infact on the first floor, and registering this as a characteristic display of absent-mindedness he abandoned the machine entirely. Abhorred, he ascended the stairwell at great pace, taking the steps in twos in what he could only have described as an attempt to salvage the time he had lost waiting for the elevator.

Sullen and exhausted, J. made a bee-line to his door, apparently giving up on the attempt to draw attention to himself in his inebriated state. On the way he stopped in his tracks to examine a picture frame which hung on wall. It was a grainy photograph of four extravagantly dressed women standing atop a set of bleachers so that they were elevated them several feet above those surrounding them. They were clearing posing for the camera, paying it more attention than the spectacle itself. However, as is often the case with beautiful women, their labored carefree expressions appeared even more natural than the surrounding spectators, whose squinted eyes and focused, blank expressions made them appear utterly miserable. J. stood frozen in his place, staring at this photograph and then at the caption, ‘British models at the Melbourne Cup, 1967’. He wondered if they were still alive and if so, if they remembered this particular day. He wondered if their daughters aspired to be models, or if they had even had children. He pitied them, but mostly he pitied himself. “If i’m ever remembered, I don’t want it to be as a single seagull in a flock, darting for discarded food”, he thought to himself. “I don’t want to be a pillar of a bridge, buckling under cars, soaking and miserable from choppy wind and waves. I don’t want to be a button on an elevator someone presses to get to their room so that they can fall asleep watching television.”