everyone wants to have a go. It’s like the woods

where a few people killed themselves and then all

of a sudden all these tourists were planning

pilgrimages there to do the same. The woods

were in an area accessible only by ferry, and after

a while the agency that governed the ferry system

declared it a crime to purchase a one-way ticket.

What I want to know is what does it mean to take out

anger on an object—can pummeling something

that won’t experience knowledge of its own breaking

be productive, or does it simply commonize

misdirected violence? Make it okay. I gave my dog

a human name, and sometimes when I encounter

people who share that name, I mention it and watch

them appear affronted, as though I’m somehow calling

them a dog. Should I have chosen instead the name

of a painting, as a painting would just take it—is that

what they’re made for? Like the new-to-market

robot that’s ostensibly for cleaning, but everyone knows

its primary function is dipping its optimized

head in a show of deference. Can’t keep it in stock.

The magnate hyping his new memoir of depression,

in interviews across a range of platforms, repeats

and repeats the line that he knew he was ill

when he surveyed the unchecked magnitude of his

holdings and still felt numb. What I want to know is

not the sum, but the specific assets that dared

deliver no thrill. There must have been art.

Everyone wonders what happens to stolen paintings,

and it’s common to speculate that they end up

hoarded in the climatized chambers of stealth

collectors. Is that what they’re made for? To marshal

their beauty in the service of diagnosis? In that case,

nobody needs them. We already have that power,

to stare back at tycoons and have them feel nothing.

For what I was made, no one has said, but my own

arc doesn’t seem to be the answer. I’m not put out,

having been instructed it is an honor to exist on

this earth for the story of somebody else.

To emblematize their wishes and dreads, to model

and mollify. Look at songbirds, how they’re only

around so our dead might appear to us as them

and thereby avoid the shame of recurring as objects.

Or the ninety-year-old sea turtle in the aquarium’s

briny dim, who allows onlookers to pride themselves

on not yet having grown old, on being comparatively

lithe and hot. This wish to feel young—recalling

my own past, I can’t imagine desiring to go backward,

but of course I am aware it’s a popular longing.

The predominant response to acts of outcry—

whether directed against a museum or merely

executed within its walls—is to archive the evidence,

wait fifty years, and then mount a broadly publicized

retrospective: FIFTY YEARS OF PROTEST ART.

Any other approach is plainly wasteful—eat up