The Gallery
28th June 2025

Depressingly similar plights,
working class peasants labouring in stark conditions,
prostitutes with the faces of angels proffering themselves to drunkards,
the upper classes in false order and feigned circumstances,
all bound by rules, norms no one subject can perceive….

And where is happiness.

My learnings are it is in love ever fleeting and infirm.
and in the absence of that,
is nothing to compare,
is emptiness,
is what worth the efforts to keep alive,
better maybe to love and then simply pass,
than to perish slowly over time,
outside of the gallery,
in the unawares?

So my mind tells me,
…but I know I will search again.

What does it take then to remain in that place, awake and aware,
to who do you answer,
to yourself, and to each other,
but in the inevitable slip, or the slow degradation,
the line of sight is severed,
you are lost again…
everything so banal.
so hung over with the footprints of humanity’s flaws,

Our thin layer living on this world, of happiness,
held in shackles by failings we do not perceive…

Bacino di S. Marco: From the Piazzetta
Giovanni Antonio Canal (Canaletto)
1697–1768