Lobster Stuffed With Cotton Candy

Chelsea, Manhattan, summer of 1999- why art should be destroyed.
You enter a space, crammed with hipsters, smelling like hot seafood.
The piece in the center of the room is this: One guy behind
another guy, feeding the first lobster, with his arms through
the first guy's shirt. That’s it. Maybe there was a soundtrack,
I don’t remember. It took twenty minutes.
The piece was titled, “How To Eat Lobster.”

Then outside, big sign- Performance! 2:00 p.m.
behind a cotton candy machine without it’s bowl.
This is all in the shadow of the last standing
elevated train line in New York, wrought iron and rivets overgrown
with forty years of plant life both indigenous and exotic.
Turning the thing into a graffiti ghetto paradise
that they can’t decide whether to turn into a park
or let Trump tear down for more gold-clad condos
in order to further bully the Hudson.

Anyway, the guy comes out at 2:15, bald with black everything,
duly pierced,and fills the machine with it’s historic carny substance.
Turns the machine on. Without it's bowl, wild pink strands whip out,
uncollected. The man bends over it, winding his hands
around and around. He slowly mummifies his hands in this shit,
stooped in half. The best part of the whole day was the wind
catching the stuff and tangling it into the clear hot sky.
The only poetry of one whole day in the summer of 1999,
in Manhattan, right there.

Meanwhile, the guy, after some time, decides he’s done.
Stands up, hands partially encased, and walks around the corner,
up seventh avenue, with the crowd following and collapses
on the sidewalk. And that’s it. Five blocks beneath
where my wife spent two hard years with a trust fund boyfriend,
in Hell’s Kitchen, years before me, back when it was exactly that.

I remember never wanting anything more
than to kick that asshole in the ribs while he was down,
go on to disembowel art forever and leave it
bleeding in the streets of Manhattan.