Chafed Hands

The fresh steamed suit knows that light
awaits its movement to render the hues
of its silk threads,
ever so proper for his entrance.

Clinking crystal and perfumed air
fill the gilded atmosphere,
where privilege wanders among
fraudulent pleasure seekers
feasting upon the wall and pedestal trophies
tempting insatiable senses of ownership addiction.

In the world of labored love
kept composed by few coins
tucked beneath an ever stooped body,
many continue to spin the cocoons of
tomorrow's adornment for the gluttonous.

They too deserve to peer at interlaces of another kind,
the paint-layered canvases upon a gallery wall,
those woven carriers of beauty often foreign
to the eyes and fingers that harvest
and weave the fine silk of the man's blue threads,
who now moves with cunning aplomb
among the spoils.

He cares not of the life-fire that plies steel upon steel,
or the exhausted arms that wield hammer and chisel of reshaped granite,
certainly not the fingers of the loom blending rainbow threads
for vibrating quiet tremors of color and light
upon intimate silence.

Is art's birth not only the beginning but the end,
the only realm that knows the infinite grace of imagination,
where creation cares not of the auction power of the gavel,
or work's enslavement by the privileged behind their castle walls?

Of course beneath the guise of champagne and charming smiles
the indulgent think otherwise

until sometime down the road fate delivers the hidden costs of their appetite,
and upchucked despair and manufactured remorse spew forth for sympathy.

Why should we care for those whose insatiable voracity for trophydom

has delivered them into the open arms of pain's chameleons,
where barbed kisses of attachment keep forever open

the wounds of chafed hands?