soot

Writing about drawing
 or painting about writing
is like wearing clothes that don’t fit

No matter how fine the cut
the frayed edges always creep into those cracks in the skin
chafing at the raw and exposing guarded flesh 
to a light it should never know

Fancy garments are too easily shrunk
in the dryer of second-hand knowledge

Salt to the wound: 
the finer the garment
the more ridiculous one feels for wearing it

Writing about one’s own work is harder still

Everything in the closet presents a false image of self-importance

an image any broader context reveals to be delusional

Yet in the age of self-promotion
as the critical police lurk in the linguistic shadows
of showmanship and spectacle
and guard the property of pretention from every known angle
leaving the house naked does not seem advisable

One is thus left to;

 climb through the auto-biographical chimney in causal con-fusion

 sneak out the back door in some kind of third-person disguise

or

 squeeze through the mixed metaphorical window 
in the hope that soot on flesh will be clothing enough to sufficiently obscure one's pixels from the satellites that record insignificance as if it truly meant something

I choose soot