Cutting Edge Sculpture Man

He is seen as the maven of metal, the jack of junk, the sultan of steel, the king of crumple. He makes sculptures for the rich and bored dentists in the foothills. They pay him thousands for his copy-cat towers of mangled rust, his tired idiom of irony. 

He poses as the product of recovery from alcohol, the student of Jung, he who faces his shadow. He glories in the beacon of attention that feature writers love to bestow on the eccentric makers with studios in the barrio. His oh-so-cool vibe reeks of condescension for critics or academe.

But this artsy icon of iron has a secret. He plays the artist, but only when the art will sell, and he changes his medium as the winds of taste change from rusted steel enigmas on stands to knock-offs of Magritte done desert style. He is the Oracle of art and turns a phrase into bumper stickers: "To master art, you must be its slave." His patrons project onto him the wisdom they lack because they know nothing or art or creativity. 

He is run by vitriol for any who question him, but especially women who have defied him, and he hangs on to old hurts like the jaws of gila monster when it latches onto prey. He attacks from behind because he is coward. He doesn't want to be seen for what he is, a font of vitriol, malevolence, revenge.

Because she said "I won't" when he said "Obey me," he has made her his sworn enemy, and he will do anything to hurt her, to destroy her. She was a shit, he says, and it was time to put a stop to it, put her in her place. He would take from her the home she lived in, the reputation she had built on years of study and teaching, her peace in sleep. 

She had defied him, and he would never let that go, would never forget. 

It didn't matter that life is an ongoing river of adaptation, of new, living cells, of incessant, scary change. The sand on the beach is always moving and the mountains are either growing or wearing down, even if we can't detect the changes. 

He was certain it was the way he said it was and he was going to stick to it. 

No amount of evidence to the contrary could move him from loops of hatred spinning in his mind, set as they were in stone that the wind was already beginning to grind down. He, after all, was a modern, self-made, metal man, like Ozymandias, king of the hipsters, a cutting edge sculpture man. 

He was an Artist, a creative genius who turned junk into gold.