Art is not created by artists
To be stolen, programmed, and constrained
In a museum, categorized, filed away by surname and style.

It is a transient force that cannot be dissected by academics,
Sold in ticket-sized, 8-to-5 windows of freak-show carnival exhibits;
Its power segregated from its intent by lovers of art, haters of people.

It is not a leashed dog that shows well under temperature-controlled,
Hospital-white, mood-lit, cathedral-capped petri dishes of dead cultures—
Beauty according to the de facto victor.

Policed by factotum overdressed in over-sized, tacky business suits,
Shushing me for awing,
Censoring the audience’s captivation—

Cans of paint thinner in their desire to inhabit the work—
Shunned for touching, shown the door for being curious.
Don’t shoo me away for wanting to behold inspiration in its purest form:

Condemned to witness the miracle before my eyes as prayer read off print,
Without emotion or any sense of devotion.
A narrative in which I’m not the protagonist or antagonist, but misread as part of the
conflict;

Unused and unaffected— unnamed third-person, second-class citizen, Public Enemy
Number 1—
A nobody from whom to protect the virtue I came to see.
Are works not elevated to the status of art by those who ingest, digest, and egest them into
Transforming their unique existence, transcending it into realms

Of sacred, denuding experience, transfigured into a pliable extract of consciousness?
Art is a mirror that reflects the artist in its beholder’s sigh,
Beckoning you to cross the invisible threshold cast by his commended spirit,

A portal into eternity bound to your being.
Art is free, therefore
Free art.

Photo by Sarah Pflug from Burst