CLOAK/1.12

And all these paintings are called Endurance.
- The naming of artworks is not their forte, but it hasn't been anyone's really for at least twenty years. Pick 'em out of a hat, I say.
Yet what issue more pressing for the self and at the same time more chimerical than stamina?
- Listen to their artists' statements.
Lizzie Borden thought they were birds—I ate, she testified, a pair—from the pear tree in the yard to her table, she carved them, she thought about chopping them fine but both times she tired in the heat. Her strength was without endurance, which came later.
Congress, an enduring race of high school principals locked in competition for most appalling forensic artifact likely to be concealed back home in the basement. Here they have discovered the break in the lines, and that against which they felt themselves to be a shield capering before and in the very midst of those who were being shielded. They take up the jawbone of the last one that got through and swing, red red rage against the silly rabbit—their clubs trace half-moons in the scaly sky.
The exercise of strength opens the way for endurance, plush chair for the bottom, plush bottom for the lake of lap to hold the general's gut. The enduring occupations of generals, who command killers go forth to make heavy a table until their tables groan with extra weight. Luxury insulates against endurance's decay, locked around its half-life throbbing.
The feasts of anxiety, everywhere anxiety in the greatest abundance, overflowing tables, dropping rotten to the floor, stripes of it smeared across the floor by skidding heels, splattered all over the windows—demons invisible to us have booked this room, they do not eat but they crave the sight of excessive anxiety, they require revels in it, so they keep ordering more, more vats of anxiety, more platters, more tons of it, more overflowing trenchers, and we are the poor waitstaff, slipping in the spill, underpaid, hammer-hearted, disgusted, enduring.
The maids who wait, the filth who rule, of course, of course.