Maker

A forward thinking man once said “just keep walking”
but didn’t like to repeat himself as he trailed off
unsteadily, feet looking for something new, another route
that hindsight shows, replacing a memory worth giving up.

In the pieces of sunlight that add up a morning the barely dead
don’t grieve as much as the ball of man whose night was a floor,
the bottomed out, beer-stained, disdainfully scuffed linoleum
a cold war veteran: a night that could’ve been avoided,
a cold night on a whore.

This is the way the hallway ends up after the doors all
are taken off, burned into stardust dusting the air agitated
the last step so that it lasts and lasts as long as the forward thinker,
cheap beer drinker, sad autobiographies that go nowhere singer.
Paint peels off the walls in appetizing flakes that turn every room
the bare color of the barren-threshold.  The hallway always.  The walls.

    Art allows humanity one of its greatest ambitions: to test decisions and their repercussions without acting.  But therein lies the paradox: nothing can be undone, and no cause can be without effect.  Though there is little appreciable impact in an artistic move on the world around the artist, the world about — the individual zeitgeist — shudders at the act of creation.  This internal upheaval becomes the catalyst for which the result is a new moment of existence.  And yet this comes not of a decision, but is born of the one commandment sacred to the artist.