A Gallery of Cruel Days

You’ve entered a gallery that celebrates your cruel days.  Here, open wounds and broken treasure display together.  Some colors hurt your eyes and many of the titles on the works make no sense.  Take that poorly rendered portrait of an old lover entitled: “Forward Thinking.”

An entire wall features giant photos of you with your bad teenage complexion.

For a moment, you lean against a bronzed sculpture of your drunken father urinating on his own shoe.  When you do, the entire weight of the sculpture is on your shoulder.

Though entirely alone with only your own echoes in the gallery, you feel as though pressed by an unruly crowd as you stagger through.

Getting in the gallery was free.

It’s in leaving that you’ll pay.

-- Mitchell Hegman