Art Appreciation

By: DB Jonas

Strictly speaking, he was only an impediment

on the way to the menagerie.

Franz Kafka, Ein Hungerkünstler

The noise that drifted

up to us in the otherwise

empty gallery

was nothing human,

something rather like

what we’d expect

from a loosened drainpipe

or desiccated seedpod

rattling in the wind,

a rusty hinge, a groan

of faulty plumbing

in the wall.

Before too long,

the connoisseurs of tedium

had wearied of this slow

uneasy art of his,

an art composed

of quietude, the art

of simply sitting there

and doing nothing,

this masterpiece of grim

refusal, requiring only

that he softly disappear

into the pile of dirty rags

where he’d at first

presumed to be

…and bit by bit,

to not be any

longer there at all,

being nothing but

the empty spectacle

of an art that’s left

behind itself

a space where there

was nothing left of him

beside the endless ache

of his peculiar vacancy,

this hollowed evidence,

this void he’d left there

in the air, and one by one

they just stopped coming.

But he continued on

upon that little platform,

nonetheless, that pile

of straw out there

for anyone who cared

to see, and those vanishing

few who did can’t help

but ever after sense

the viscous presence

of his absentness,

can’t manage to suppress

the unfamiliar sound,

the noiseless groan, of that

peculiar emptiness.

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DB Jonas is the author of three collections of poetry, Tarantula Season and Other Poems (2023), Flight Risk (2025) and In Dubious Terrain (forthcoming, 2025) Further examples of his work can be accessed at jonaspoetry.com