Out of Quarantine - Michaelangelo's Wrestling Forethought

I’m under quarantine. All freelancers under quarantine.  All great artists under quarantine. Patrons. O my patrons. O my patronage! The thanklessness to my lady, I mourn her, we were intimate. When the world made claims on me, they all stopped loving me, but her. That’s the price of greatness: my lady's thankless gift to me. I thankless to her. This is what is not understood in the world after Florence and the Medices.
   My carceral drag of my flayed face in my hand through the Sistine sky, I am free. I have finally escaped the Florentine incomprehension and seen Beethoven collecting coins outside his house, just for a greeting from him, and the merchant tribes of Veneto connecting up with him by a tachyon wracking up space-time Cauchy vectors and landing as Crystal ships on the fortified Festival metropolis of Asole.
   It is 2009 and Jethro Tull are at the festival, old Renaissance boot-shiners with a feral flute, and a layer of music to confound and delight the senses. Craggy voice, he gets it: what is pain to understanding? I have dropped onto a five lane highway in L.A. I am walking with a sure stride against the against the flow of automobiles on a five-lane highway and their incredible participation in the creation of the free democracy of Thomas Paine’s America. I am Michelangelo. I traded in my flayed face to a collector on the silica boardwalk over the Aurora sands of Long Beach, and paid a plastic surgeon to reconstruct what was lost.

Anatol Cordua © 2017